Power Of Suggesty, As It Pertains To Memory

Suggestibility, as it pertains to memory, is a person’s unknown tendency to incorporate incorrect or misleading information into his or her own personal recollection of an event. Some contest that suggestion is a subset of misattribution, but this is not this case. Misattribution can occur without the presence of overt suggestion; this is not the case for suggestion. This finding places suggestion and its effects in a distinct class of its own. While the power of suggestion can be hard to understand for some, it becomes all too clear when suggestion is referenced in the context of the criminal justice system, where leading questions can lead to eyewitness misidentifications, suggestive recall procedures can produce false memories, and aggressive …show more content…
This was the question Philip Higham sought to understand. In his experiment he presented a video and then followed the video with a suggestive statement about what the person had seen. When the person was asked to recall what they had seen they added the suggestive statement into their memory of the video. This experiment confirms that suggestive questions can lead to memory distortion from source memory problems, but it also showed an even more important finding. The findings imply memory can be distorted even if the participants realize that the experimenter gave the important information. Suggestion can play an even more subtly role in witness memory distortion, by simply providing an affirming response after a persons testimony can solidify their memory even if it is distorted. This finding was confirmed through the experiments of Wells and Bradfield, in which they showed that by providing positive affirmation after a participant misidentified a culprit the participant claimed higher confidence and trust in their memories. These findings have lead law enforcement to try and implement broader questions during interrogations in order to control for