Analysis reveals reliability and validity issues in false memory research, suggesting implications for court cases.
Our article ‘Lost in the mall? Interrogating judgements of false memory’ (Andrews and Brewin 2024) was the first to reanalyse transcripts from the false memory implantation paradigm and throw light on the nature of investigator‐based judgements of false memory. Commentaries on our report include several misrepresentations of what we did as well as some misconceptions about our methods, results, and conclusions. After addressing these, we discuss persistent concerns about the reliability, validity and generalisability of the paradigm and about the tendency for the results of false memory research to be exaggerated. These exaggerations sometimes later appear in expert witness reports and influence court deliberations.
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Brewin et al. (2025) studied this question.
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