How could you not know that you didn't commit a crime? Perhaps because your mind was altered to prohibit you from remembering that you're innocent.
If that sounds confusing or bizarre, this will only add to the bizarre, confusing nature of such an event: New research suggests that this very thing may have already happened, and the implications are profound.
A press release from the Association for Psychological Science said that new research published in the organization's journal, Psychological Science, discovered evidence from some cases of wrongful conviction that suspects can be questioned by authorities in a way that could lead them to falsely believe in, and confess to, crimes they didn't really commit.
The organization said the new research is providing "lab-based evidence for this phenomenon, showing that innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years."
Researchers said data suggests that participants in such cases had come to internalize stories they were told, then provided illustrative detail about them even though they were contrived.
Many study subjects convinced they had done it
"Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories," psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw, of the University of Bedfordshire in the United Kingdom, said.
"All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques," she added.
Shaw, along with the study's co-author, Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia in Canada, received permission to make contact with primary caregivers of university students who participated in the study, the organization said. In turn, the caregivers were tasked with filling out a questionnaire about specific events that study participants may have experienced between the ages of 11 and 14, giving as much detail as they could.
In all, researchers identified 60 students who have not been involved in any of the crimes that had been labeled as false memory targets for the study and who also met the criteria for the study. The participants were then brought to a lab for three 40-minute interviews that were conducted about a week apart.
As noted in the press release:
In the first interview, the researcher told the student about two events he or she had experienced as a teen, only one of which actually happened. For some, the false event related to a crime that resulted in contact with the police (assault, assault with a weapon, or theft). For others, the false event was emotional in nature, such as personal injury, attack by a dog, or loss of a huge sum of money.The potential for abuse is astounding
Importantly, the false event stories included some true details about that time in the student's life, taken from the caregiver questionnaire.
Participants were then tasked with explaining what happened in each of the two events. When they would experience difficulty in explaining the false event, the interviewer would encourage them to nonetheless try, saying that if they would use specific memory strategies it was possible they could recall more details.
In the follow-up interviews, the researchers would again ask students to recall in as much detail as possible both the true and the false events. The students would describe certain aspects of each memory, like how vivid it was and how sure they were about it.
The results were stunning:
Of the 30 participants who were told they had committed a crime as a teenager, 21 (71%) were classified as having developed a false memory of the crime; of the 20 who were told about an assault of some kind (with or without a weapon), 11 reported elaborate false memory details of their exact dealings with the police.A similar proportion of students (76.67%) formed false memories of the emotional event they were told about.
Read the full accounting of this research - which has tremendous potential for abuse - here.
Reader Comments
....by a common delusion that becomes a 'fact', and thereafter, a 'shared history', then ultimately, an untouchable aspect of a society's dominant culture, employed by the elites to enforce conformity with the rules they have fashioned to keep and grow their power and control over the masses. Any dissent is viewed as treason or worse, and usually punishable by death or banishment/isolation (which most times also meant death, eventually.) Public imprisonment allows for the offender to keep spreading the doubts regarding the official narrative, and that is not acceptable to the PTB. They must be silenced, period. The false, useful narrative must remain inviolate.
This is everywhere we look today, and always has been thus. Clearly then, it is deeply-seated human nature to conform to the wishes of the powerful, as that provided obvious survival advantages versus challenging authority in ancient, pre-historic times, when survival was precarious at best. Doing what the Alpha Male said was necessary for survival, and quickly conforming one's reality to those wishes became a survival characteristic that is now forever deeply embedded in our collective human nature, or so it would seem from the evidence all around us.
Sadly, what worked then is now proving to be our "Achilles Heel" as a species, as the wishful, fanciful, easily deluded lemmings are merrily led right over the edge by those in power over and over again. Orwell's 'memory holes' and 'double think' are all part and parcel to this species-wide behavior of widespread, near universal authoritarian follower's disease that threatens to consume all of humanity in WW3. Collective social hallucinations and fantasies abound and are carefully cultivated by the PTB and their messengers, playing directly on this human condition of deep susceptibility to suggestion and group think.
That science is only now figuring out just how easily suggestible we are as individuals, and therefore as a species as well, is simply 'too little, too late' to stop that condition from being employed on a global scale yet again.
The demonization of Islam and the idealizing of Judaism and Christianity are just the most recent (nauseating) examples of what we have to contend with due to this human susceptibility. Strong, forceful dissent from these utterly false paradigms is viewed as either treason requiring punishment, or signs of possible mental illness needing 'therapy'. The newest definitions of mental illness in psychological circles is found in the so-called, "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", fifth edition (or 'DSM-5'), which completely supports this paradigm of calling dissent and free-thinking a mental DISEASE (such as 'ODD' or "Oppositional-Defiance Disorder"), which is very frightening indeed.
Some things never change, and human nature seems to be one of them, sadly......