It’s surprisingly easy to create a false memory in someone
Every memory we have is in a sense imperfect—like taking a photograph of a photograph. And not only do we regularly misremember things, it’s astonishingly easy to create false memories in others. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is the Lost in the Mall experiment, in which researchers successfully convinced about one-fourth of volunteers that they had gotten lost in the mall as children.
Numerous later studies, using different methods of convincing or other false events, have consistently shown that a percentage of people can be fooled into believing these kinds of traumatic childhood memories. A 2023 study that replicated the exact design of the original experiment, for instance, found that 35% of participants were fooled.
