Abstract
Research has demonstrated that deceptive responses can undermine item and source memories. However, previous studies have often randomly assigned participants to an honest or deception group and asked them to respond in specific ways in an interview, rather than providing them a choice of what response to give. Moreover, little attention has been given to destination memory in previous research. Using a daily life paradigm, we investigated the effects of deception on memory. After completing a mock shopping task, participants were told that someone would ask them questions about their shopping lists. The participants voluntarily chose to tell the truth or lie in the interview and were encouraged to respond as they would in their daily lives. An item memory test, source memory test and destination memory test were given 48 h after the interview. Source and destination memories but not item memories were impaired for participants who chose to lie. Specifically, liars forgot the things about which they lied and mistakenly believed that they lied about many things that they did not, and they also did not remember to whom they lied. We conclude that deception can disrupt memory in daily life.
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Data availability
Data files, memory tests and R script for data analysis are available from online Figshare repository: https://figshare.com/s/4de6526d8560f82185cd. The experiment was not preregistered.
Notes
Thirty-two adults (11 males) were recruited in the replicated experiment. They were asked to complete a mock shopping task, a filler task (playing Tetris), and then a baseline memory test. The participants were told that two interviewers would ask them several questions about their shopping lists, and they could answer each question honestly or dishonestly. The participants were paid for 30 yuan for their participation.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Lu Zhang and Meihua Guo for helping collect data. We sincerely thank the reviewers, Christina Pfeuffer and Fabiana Battista, for their insightful and constructive comments, which substantially improved our manuscript.
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YL designed the study with the help from ZL. YL collected and ZL analyzed the data. YL wrote the manuscript with the help from ZL and with critical comments from XL.
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Yan Li declares that she has no conflict of interest. Zhiwei Liu declares that he has no conflict of interest. Xiping Liu declares that she has no conflict of interest. The authors did not have a financial relationship with any organization for this work. The authors have full control of all primary data.
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Li, Y., Liu, Z. & Liu, X. Who did I lie to that day? Deception impairs memory in daily life. Psychological Research 86, 1763–1773 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01619-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01619-x