When Photographs Create False Memories

Photographs help people illustrate the stories of their lives and the significant stories of their society. However, photographs can do more than illustrate events; in this article, we show that photographs can distort memory for them. We describe the course of our ‘‘falsememory implantation’’ research, and review recent work showing that photographs can sometimes increase—while other times decrease—false memories. First, we discuss research showing that a doctored photo, showing subjects taking a completely fictitious hot-air-balloon ride, can cultivate false memories for that experience. We hypothesize that the photograph helps subjects to imagine details about the event that they later confuse with reality. Second, we show that although photographs are indeed powerful sources of influence on memory, they are not necessarily as powerful as narrative. In fact, in certain circumstances, photographs might constrain imagination. Third, we discuss research showing that true photographs can also cultivate false memories. Finally, we present recent work showing that photographs can create false memories for current events. KEYWORDS—memories; false memories; photographs Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories, said the writer Alice Munro. People tell their stories in words and pictures; they write letters, pull out childhood photo albums at family reunions, and talk about what happened when, where, and to whom. Sometimes people are told stories by others—socially significant, newsworthy stories in the paper or on television. Whether they are the stories of individual lives or of society as a whole, important stories are often illustrated with photographs, which give the imprimatur of authenticity. In this paper, we review the research showing that photographs can create false stories. Photographs can distort memory. A decade ago, Loftus and Pickrell (1995) showed how easily people can be led to remember wholly false events. They asked subjects to read stories of some childhood events, one of which described each subject getting lost in a shopping mall. That event was false, but by the end of the study, 25% of subjects falsely remembered at least some details about it. In the scientific community, the paradigm has proven both popular and powerful, with nine similar narrative-based studies showing a mean false recall of 33% (see Garry & Wade, 2005, for a brief review). Considered as a whole, research using this ‘‘lost in the mall’’ paradigm shows us how easy it is to implant false memories using remarkably simple technology. Yet we live in a world of increasingly sophisticated technology. For example, not so long ago, only Hollywood studios and advertising agencies had the skill and the equipment to doctor photographs. These days, it seems that everyone has a digital camera and image-editing software. While it may seem like harmless fun to airbrush an annoying ex out of a photo or to cobble together a photo of little Theo meeting his favorite action figure, recent evidence suggests that doctored photos can doctor memory, too. FALSE PHOTOGRAPHS AND FALSE MEMORIES ‘‘It isn’t trustworthy simply because it’s a picture,’’ the photographer Pedro Meyer told Wired magazine. ‘‘It is trustworthy if someone we trust made it’’ (Rosenberg, 1995, p. 171). Meyer is right, of course—yet people do trust photos. People think they reliably capture the past. Yes, they may know that photographs can be doctored, and they may not trust the famous, allegedly doctored photo of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle in his backyard, but they still think their personal photographs are real. What might be the power of a doctored childhood photograph on memory? To answer this question, Wade, Garry, Read, and Lindsay (2002) adapted the Loftus and Pickrell (1995) ‘‘Lost in the mall’’ Address correspondence to Maryanne Garry, Victoria University of Wellington, School of Psychology, Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand, 6005; e-mail: [email protected]. This photograph is widely available on the Internet; for example, at John McAdams’ JFK Assassination Home Page: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/photos. jpg CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 14—Number 6 321 Copyright r 2005 American Psychological Society method, but replaced narratives with photographs. The question was simply whether showing subjects a doctored photograph— with no supporting narrative—would lead them to remember a false experience. They showed each subject four photos: Three were real childhood photos and one was fake, showing the subject taking a childhood hot-air-balloon ride. The doctored photos were created for each subject by using Photoshop and an assortment of additional childhood photos. Wade et al. ‘‘cut’’ the subjects and at least one family member out of these additional photos and ‘‘pasted’’ them into a dummy photo of a hot-air-balloon ride (see Fig. 1). Family-members verified that the balloon ride never happened. After subjects reviewed each photo three times over a maximum of 2 weeks, 50% remembered something about the ride. Often these reports were rich with detail, and at the end of the study, subjects tended to express genuine astonishment when they learned the photo was a fake. Wade et al. (2002) speculated that photographs might give subjects some kind of cognitive ‘‘springboard,’’ allowing them to generate thoughts, feelings, details, images—the hallmarks of genuine memories—more easily than is possible than with verbal descriptions. Subjects confused these mental products for genuine experience, a process called source confusion (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). In fact, the comparatively high rate of false recall led them to wonder which medium is better at cultivating false memories: photos or narratives? To answer this question, Garry and Wade (2005) combined the methods of Loftus and Pickrell (1995) and Wade et al. (2002) such that half the subjects saw a photograph of themselves taking a balloon ride while the other half read a description of the same false event. To make sure the description and the photo conveyed the same information, other researchers were asked to extract all the information they could from the balloon photo and use that information to create the narrative. By interview three, 80% of the subjects who read a false narrative reported memories of the event, compared to 50% of those subjects who saw a false photo. Moreover, when subjects were asked whether photographs or narratives were better at ‘‘jogging’’ their memories during the study, there was an interesting interaction: Narrative subjects said that photos were better memory joggers, while photo subjects said that narratives were better memory joggers. Taken together, these studies suggest that photos alone are powerful enough to elicit false memories on their own but that they are not necessarily more powerful than narratives. In fact, they might be less powerful than narratives. If, as Wade et al. (2002) hypothesized, photographs do make it easier for people to imagine—and then come to believe—the false event depicted, then how do we account for Garry and Wade’s (2005) finding that narratives actually elicited more false memories than photographs? The answer may lie in the fact that the photo provided a concrete visual depiction of the balloon ride, making it more Fig. 1. Demonstration of the doctoring process as used in Wade et al. (2002). Subjects are ‘‘cut’’ from an original photo (A) and ‘‘pasted’’ into a dummy balloon photo (B). Subjects are shown the false photo (C) and asked how much they remember about the event over three interviews. 322 Volume 14—Number 6 When Photographs Create False Memories