Source misattributions and the suggestibility of eyewitness memory.

Although the suggestibility of eyewitness memory is well documented, previous studies have not clearly established the extent to which misled Ss might come to believe they actually remember seeing the suggested details they report.To assess whether Ss confuse misleading suggestions for their "real memories" of a witnessed event, Ss were asked specific questions about their memory for the source of suggested items.The results of 5 experiments showed that misled Ss do sometimes come to believe they remember seeing items that were merely suggested to them, a phenomenon we refer to as the source misattribution effect.Nevertheless, the results also showed that the magnitude of this effect varies and that source misattributions are not an inevitable consequence of exposure to suggestions.It is now well established that the accuracy of eyewitness testimony can be severely compromised by exposure to misleading postevent suggestion (Ceci & Bruck, 1993; Lindsay, in press; Loftus, 1979aLoftus, , 1979b;;Loftus & Loftus, 1980).Numerous studies have demonstrated that subjects can be led to report events different from those they actually witnessed.In this research we sought to answer a fundamental question about suggestibility phenomena: Do subjects come to believe that they actually remember seeing the suggested details they report?Most of our knowledge about eyewitness suggestibility comes from laboratory studies of the "misinformation effect."In this experimental paradigm, subjects are first shown a film clip or slide show depicting a forensically relevant event and are later exposed to misinformation that contradicts selected aspects of the event.For example, in a well-known study by Loftus, Miller, and Burns (1978), subjects who had viewed a traffic accident involving a stop sign were later asked a series of questions, one of which incorrectly referred to the stop sign as a yield sign. Later, when asked whether they had seen a stop sign or a yield sign at the traffic accident, misled subjects were much more likely than control subjects (who had not been misled) to select the suggested item.Many other studies have replicated this effect (e.