| Research shows that people tend to distort their memories of an event when later exposed to misleading information about it, a phenomenon known as the misinformation effect. In one experiment, American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues showed subjects a series of slides depicting an automobile accident with a pedestrian at an intersection. As part of the sequence, half of the subjects saw a car stopped at a yield sign, top, and the other half saw the car stopped at a stop sign, bottom. After the slide show, some subjects in both groups were asked misleading questions about what they had seen. For example, half of the subjects who had seen the stop sign were asked, “Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the yield sign?” Later, subjects were asked to choose which of two slides they had seen earlier: the one with a stop sign or the one with a yield sign. People that had received misleading questions chose the correct slide only 41 percent of the time, whereas those not given misleading information were correct 75 percent of the time. |
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