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In the Scientific American, two researchers, Andrews and Brewin (2025), addressed the issue of false memories. This issue has been especially important in court. Are the memories of witnesses to be believed? It is to be acknowledged that we can forget or inaccurately remember. But are we vulnerable to false memories, especially those potentially supplied by others to convince us we remember what never happened?
In 1995 there was a seminal experiment that allegedly established that false memories are easily planted. This study as well as some that followed are used to question the veracity of a plaintiff's testimony in court. The ease of implantation has also been used to assert that therapists have created false memories of childhood sexual abuse in their clients.
The 1995 research reported that a fourth of the subjects remembered the false memory either fully or partially. Andrews and Brewin (2025) broke down the study into six components. Those who had been rated as having a full false memory recalled fewer than three parts; those who had been rated as having a partial memory recalled about one. On the whole, they concluded that only five participants had claimed the false memory, not the43 who had been identified in the original study.
Andrews and Brewin's (2025) examination of the 1995 study leads to serious reservations about claims in court that testimony is to be disregarded because false memories are easily implanted. They concluded, "Although memory is limited and sometimes wrong, completely false memories are not easy to implant Most of the time memory does a good enough job" (p. 95).
Reference: Andrews, B., & Brewin, C. R. (2025). How susceptible are we to false memories? Scientific American, 333(1), 94-95.