Snap Shot
- The question: Can information a witness encounters after an event, through questions, conversations, photographs, or media, change what the witness later reports about the event?
- What the research shows: Misleading post-event information can lead people to report details they never saw, often confidently, and the effect has been replicated for five decades, including in military trainees tested after a highly stressful interrogation. It is larger for peripheral and weakly encoded details, after longer delays, and when the source is close or trusted; warnings given after exposure cut it by more than half on average.
- What it does not show: Misinformation affects some details for some people; in the classic studies many participants resisted it, and the original memory often survives. Exposure to post-event information does not make an entire account unreliable, and the research offers no way to tell from an account alone whether a particular detail came from the event or from a later source.
- The law: Expert testimony on the effect is assessed under Rule 702 (as amended in 2023), Daubert, and Kumho Tire, and in courts-martial under Houser; it must stay general and may not declare a particular memory false. Suggestive government identification procedures are screened under due process and Mil. R. Evid. 321; Arizona permits general testimony (Chapple, Salazar-Mercado).
- Issues for each side: Prosecutors should preserve and rely on early, recorded accounts and document what each witness was told, without treating later detail or confidence as corroboration; defense counsel should tie a misinformation claim to a specific source, a specific detail, and a sequence showing exposure came first.
The misinformation effect is the change in a person’s report of an event that results from misleading information encountered afterward, in a question that assumes a fact, a conversation with another witness, a photograph shown during an investigation, or a news story or post. The person may later report the suggested detail as part of what he or she experienced, sincerely and sometimes confidently. A report shaped this way is a memory error, not a lie.
The effect reaches court because nearly every witness, complainant, and accused person encounters post-event information before trial. Whether a disputed detail came from the person’s own experience or from a later source is a recurring question in identification cases, sexual assault and child abuse prosecutions, and cases that turn on competing accounts of a brief, confusing event.
This paper covers the classic experiments, competing accounts of what happens to the original memory, the conditions that enlarge or shrink the effect, warnings, a study of a highly stressful event, and recent work. Co-witness and media sources are treated further in External Sources of Memory Distortion, and children in Suggestibility of Children’s Memory.
The Classic Studies
In the best-known early experiment, students watched films of traffic accidents. Those asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” into each other estimated 40.8 miles per hour on average, compared with 34.0 for those asked about cars that “hit” each other. In a second experiment with 150 participants, 32% of those questioned with “smashed” reported a week later that they had seen broken glass, which the film did not show, compared with 14% of those asked with “hit” and 12% of controls (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). Most participants in every condition did not report glass.
Loftus et al. (1978) then established the three-stage procedure still in use: a witness experiences an event, receives information about it that is partly misleading, and is tested. Participants saw slides of a car at a stop sign or a yield sign, answered a question that presupposed the other sign, and later chose between the two. In the first experiment, 75% of those given consistent information chose correctly, compared with 41% of those given misleading information. A later experiment found that misinformation was more damaging when introduced shortly before the test, after the original memory had weakened, than immediately after the event.
Hundreds of later studies extended these findings to other events and populations, and to reports of entire events that never occurred (Frenda et al., 2011; Loftus, 2005). A 2026 online replication of the 1978 procedure again found the effect; when the test was redesigned to reduce participants’ incentive simply to go along with what they had read, the effect was smaller but still present (Wiechert et al., 2026).
What Happens to the Original Memory
Researchers agree that the effect is real but have long debated what it reflects. The earliest interpretation was that misleading information replaces the original detail (Loftus et al., 1978). McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) noted that a misled participant who never encoded the original might pick the suggested item without any change in memory, so they had participants choose between the original item and a new item never mentioned. Across six experiments, misled participants were correct on 37% of critical items on the standard test, compared with 72% for control items, but on the modified test they were correct 72% of the time, compared with 75% for controls. The authors concluded that the original memory had not been impaired, at least as measured by recognition. Later work has supported the view that original and suggested information can coexist and compete: thoroughly explaining the study and the presence of inconsistent details eliminated a previously produced misinformation effect, and access to the original information was intact (Oeberst & Blank, 2012).
A third account rests on source monitoring. Memories carry no label stating where they came from; people infer the source from a memory’s features, and errors are more likely when sources are similar, when the event was poorly encoded, and when decisions are quick (Johnson et al., 1993; Lane & Houston, 2021, pp. 61–66). A person may remember a suggested detail accurately but attribute it to the event rather than to the question in which it appeared. Participants in one series of experiments claimed to remember seeing details they had encountered only in post-event questions, even when asked specifically about source (Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). This account explains why a misled witness can be both sincere and confident.
A more recent question is whether recalling a memory makes it temporarily changeable. Chan and LaPaglia (2013) found that participants who recalled an event and then received new information were later less able to recognize original details, and interpreted the result as disruption of reconsolidation. Rindal et al. (2016) found that reactivating a memory before misinformation increased reporting of the misinformation, but that the original details remained recoverable on a McCloskey–Zaragoza test, which argues against overwriting. Lane and Houston (2021, pp. 139–140) describe the mechanism as still debated, and the 2026 replication found its results most consistent with accounts in which original and suggested details compete, without settling the question (Wiechert et al., 2026). In a given case the mechanism usually cannot be identified and need not be: under every account, a sincere report can contain a detail that did not come from the event.
Conditions That Make the Effect Larger or Smaller
Delay and encoding strength. Misinformation is more effective when the original memory is weak. It had more effect when introduced just before the test than soon after the event (Loftus et al., 1978), and dividing participants’ attention during an event increased later claims to have seen suggested details (Lane & Houston, 2021, pp. 65–66).
Noticing the discrepancy. Under the discrepancy-detection principle, people who notice that post-event information conflicts with what they saw are less likely to adopt it (Tousignant et al., 1986).
Source and repetition. The source matters: participants were more likely to adopt information from a friend or romantic partner than from a stranger (Hope et al., 2008). Experiments and a meta-analysis published in 2023 found that hearing the same misinformation repeatedly increased its effect modestly, while hearing it from several sources rather than one added nothing beyond repetition (O’Donnell et al., 2023).
Central and peripheral details. Peripheral details are generally more vulnerable than central ones. Misinformation effects were concentrated on peripheral aspects of an event in one developmental study (Sutherland & Hayne, 2001), and in a hypothetical sexual assault scenario peripheral details were remembered less accurately than central details (Flowe et al., 2016). Central details are more resistant, not immune.
Age. Children, especially preschoolers, are on average more susceptible than adults (Ceci et al., 1987), and 11- and 12-year-olds were more affected than adults in one study (Sutherland & Hayne, 2001). In a co-witness study, adults aged 60 to 80 were no more susceptible than adults aged 18 to 30 (Gabbert et al., 2003). Age differences are averages; many children and older adults resist misinformation (see Suggestibility of Children’s Memory and Aging and Memory).
Warnings and Retractions
A meta-analysis of 25 post-warning studies (155 effect sizes) found that telling people after exposure that some of what they had encountered may have been inaccurate reduced the misinformation effect to less than half its size on average, with negligible cost to memory for other details (Blank & Launay, 2014). The most thorough form of debriefing eliminated the effect in some experiments (Oeberst & Blank, 2012). Warnings, source-focused tests, and corrective feedback reduce errors but rarely eliminate them (Lane & Houston, 2021, pp. 81–87). More recently, in two experiments with 422 participants, general sensitization instructions given before the memory test, which did not require telling witnesses that a particular source was wrong, reduced the effect, strengthened the confidence–accuracy relationship, and reduced overconfidence at the highest confidence level (Spearing et al., 2025). These are low-stakes laboratory studies, but they show that how a witness is later questioned can matter.
Misinformation After a Highly Stressful Event
Morgan et al. (2013) studied 861 active-duty U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel during the mock prisoner-of-war phase of Navy survival school training. Each trainee was interrogated for about 30 minutes by an unfamiliar instructor amid isolation and sleep and food deprivation. Some then received misinformation through leading questions, a video, or a photograph of a different man. About a day and a half later, trainees completed a questionnaire and viewed a nine-photograph array that did not contain the interrogator. Leading questions sharply increased endorsement of false details; for example, 27% of misled trainees reported that the interrogator had a weapon, compared with 3% of controls. Among trainees shown the photograph, 91% identified someone from the array as their interrogator, compared with 53% of controls, and 84% of those misled trainees who made an identification chose the man in the photograph, compared with 15% of controls who made one.
The study shows that misinformation can affect memory for a recent, intensely stressful, personally experienced event, including a face seen at close range. Its limits cut both ways. More than half of the controls made a false identification without any misinformation, so stress and deprivation alone impaired identification. The authors could not debrief participants to learn whether memories or only reports had changed, and they cautioned that rates among young military personnel under deprivation may not generalize; Lane and Houston (2021, pp. 101–103) raise similar cautions about related survival-school studies.
Co-Witnesses, the Accused, and Recent Work
Other witnesses are a common source of post-event information. When pairs who had watched different versions of an event discussed it, 71% later reported at least one detail they could have learned only from their partner (Gabbert et al., 2003). Such conformity can reflect a change in memory, deference to a partner believed to be more accurate, or avoidance of disagreement (Wright et al., 2009), and it has been replicated in ten countries (Ito et al., 2019). In a survey of 60 witnesses at a police identification suite, 88% had co-witnesses and 58% of those discussed the event with at least one (Skagerberg & Wright, 2008). Discussion also cuts the other way: in a field study, correct co-witness information improved later accuracy, while incorrect information led some participants to adopt it (Bartlett et al., 2022). External Sources of Memory Distortion treats these sources in detail.
The effect applies to every party. In three experiments with 1,341 participants who watched a first-person video of events leading to an alleged sexual assault and were randomly assigned the role of complainant or accused, susceptibility to later misinformation did not differ by role (Greene et al., 2025). These are laboratory findings, and they apply equally to accused persons, complainants, and other witnesses. Scientists also debate the effect’s implications for witness memory generally: one review argued that memory is generally reliable on an initial test conducted before contamination and with proper procedures (Wixted et al., 2018), and a commentary cautioned against overstating that reliability (Wade et al., 2018). Both treat the first, uncontaminated account as especially valuable.
Limits of the Evidence
Most misinformation research uses students or online samples, brief filmed or slide-show events, low stakes, and misinformation about peripheral details such as a traffic sign. Real witnesses may care far more about the event, may have had longer exposure to it, and may encounter post-event information repeatedly over months; the research does not settle whether those differences make details more or less resistant. The Morgan et al. (2013) study found that misinformation changed the reports and identifications of trained military personnel after a highly stressful interrogation, but its participants were under sleep and food deprivation, its questionnaire measured endorsement, not belief, and the study did not determine whether memories or only reports changed; more than half of the control trainees, who received no misinformation, also chose someone from an array that did not contain the interrogator.
The results are group averages. In most conditions a substantial share of participants resisted misinformation, and effect sizes vary across procedures. Experiments can show that misinformation can change a report; they cannot show that a particular detail in a particular account was changed. Once exposure has occurred, later confidence, vividness, and detail do not reliably separate suggested details from genuine ones (Lane & Houston, 2021, p. 81), although confidence recorded at a fair, uncontaminated first test can be informative (Wixted & Wells, 2017; see “Confidence and Accuracy”), so the source of a disputed detail usually has to be traced through the record of what the witness said and heard, and when.
Questions to Ask About This Research
When the broken-glass result of Loftus and Palmer (1974) is cited, counsel should ask what exactly was counted: 32% of participants questioned with “smashed” reported glass, compared with 12% of controls, so most misled participants did not. When Morgan et al. (2013) is offered to show that stress gives no protection against suggestion, ask who was studied and whether the result applies to this witness: young military trainees under sleep and food deprivation, a target-absent array after a photograph was shown, and no debriefing on whether beliefs changed. When a warning or retraction is said to cure exposure, ask how large the remaining effect was, since Blank and Launay (2014) found that warnings cut the effect by more than half on average rather than eliminating it. When an expert relies on the mechanism debate, ask whether the conclusion follows: neither McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) nor Chan and LaPaglia (2013) can show whether a particular witness’s original memory is intact. These questions are explained in “Reading Research Claims: A Guide for Attorneys” on this site.
The Misinformation Effect and the Law
Federal and Military Standards
Expert testimony about the misinformation effect is governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 702, as amended December 1, 2023, which requires the proponent to show that it is more likely than not that the testimony rests on sufficient facts or data, is the product of reliable principles and methods, and reflects a reliable application of those methods to the case. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) assigned trial judges the gatekeeping role, and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999) extended it to all expert testimony, including technical or other specialized knowledge. Such testimony is ordinarily general and may not tell the factfinder that a particular witness’s memory is false or true. When suggestive circumstances were not arranged by law enforcement, such as a witness seeing a suspect’s photograph in the news, due process does not require a preliminary reliability inquiry; other safeguards, including cross-examination, jury instructions, and expert testimony, apply instead (Perry v. New Hampshire, 2012).
In courts-martial, Military Rule of Evidence 702 tracks the federal rule; under Military Rule of Evidence 1102, the 2023 amendment became part of the military rule in 2025 (Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, 2025; practitioners should confirm current text), and admissibility is assessed under the six factors of United States v. Houser (1993). Where misinformation reaches an identification through a government procedure, such as showing a witness a single photograph before a lineup, Military Rule of Evidence 321 permits a timely motion to suppress an identification that results from an unlawful identification process, defined to include one “so suggestive as to create a substantial likelihood of misidentification” (Mil. R. Evid. 321(b)(1), (c)(1)).
Arizona
Arizona Rule of Evidence 702 adopted the Daubert standard effective January 1, 2012, and was amended effective January 1, 2024, to conform to the 2023 federal amendment (Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004). In State v. Chapple (1983), Arizona’s leading decision on memory expert testimony, the Arizona Supreme Court held that excluding expert testimony on factors affecting eyewitness reliability was an abuse of discretion in a case that turned on contested identification, while leaving admission otherwise to the trial court’s discretion. A defendant who challenges a pretrial identification, including one that may have been shaped by a photograph or information supplied by police, may request a hearing under State v. Dessureault (1969), at which, if the pretrial procedure was unduly suggestive, the State must show by clear and convincing evidence that the in-court identification is not tainted by it. State v. Salazar-Mercado (2014) permits general, educational expert testimony that satisfies Rules 702 and 403, and experts may not opine on the truthfulness of a particular witness (State v. Lindsey, 1986, 149 Ariz. at 475; State v. Moran, 1986).
Special Issues in Legal Practice
The principles described above apply with equal force to every party in a legal proceeding. The science operates the same way regardless of who is asking the questions, and the research summarized here does not by itself favor either side. What differs between the parties is not the science but the vantage point — the particular places where these issues tend to surface, and the particular errors each party is best positioned to guard against. The two summaries below identify those recurring issues. They are offered for orientation, not as litigation strategy; in every case the controlling question is what the evidence in that case will, and will not, support, and the expert’s role is to inform the trier of fact rather than to advocate for either side.
Special Issues for Prosecutors
The research supports several propositions prosecutors can legitimately present. The misinformation effect concerns particular details with an identifiable post-event source; it is weaker for central than for peripheral details, many people resist it, and the original memory often survives and can be retrieved with careful questioning (McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985; Oeberst & Blank, 2012). Exposure to other people’s accounts does not by itself make a witness unreliable, and correct information from others can improve accuracy (Bartlett et al., 2022). An account given early, recorded, and obtained with open-ended questions before any identifiable exposure rests on firm ground. Prosecutors and investigators can protect that value by recording first accounts, separating witnesses, avoiding questions that supply details, and documenting what each witness was shown or told.
The research also counsels caution. Misinformation can be reported sincerely and confidently, and in one study of 861 military trainees, a highly stressful interrogation did not prevent misinformation from changing reports (Morgan et al., 2013). When a disputed detail first appears after a leading question, a photograph, or another person’s account, the factfinder is entitled to weigh that sequence, and growing confidence or added detail across interviews is not corroboration. A government identification procedure that exposed the witness to the suspect’s image beforehand invites a suppression motion under Military Rule of Evidence 321 or a Dessureault hearing. The same principles apply to an accused’s admissions: a nonpublic detail in a statement is stronger evidence of independent knowledge when the record shows that the detail was not supplied during questioning.
Special Issues for Defense
The research supports several propositions defense counsel can legitimately present. Misleading post-event information can alter what witnesses report, the altered report can be sincere and confident, and the effect is larger for peripheral and weakly encoded details, after longer delays, when the source is a friend or partner, and when the information is repeated (Hope et al., 2008; Loftus et al., 1978; O’Donnell et al., 2023). In one study of 861 military trainees, misinformation changed reports and identifications of the interrogator, a face seen at close range, after a highly stressful interrogation (Morgan et al., 2013); the study did not determine whether memories or only reports changed. Expert testimony on these principles, combined with evidence of what a witness was exposed to before a statement, is a legitimate aid to the factfinder.
The research also counsels caution about its limits. Misinformation affects some details for some people; it is not a basis for treating every account that followed a conversation or interview as contaminated, and even in the classic studies many participants resisted it. A misinformation argument is strongest when it identifies a specific source, links it to a specific detail, and shows that the exposure came before the detail first appeared; it is weakest when the detail was reported before any identifiable exposure. An expert cannot testify that a particular detail was contaminated or that a witness’s memory is false, and findings about traffic signs and filmed events do not transfer automatically to a central, personally experienced event. The same principles apply to the accused’s own account, which may have been shaped by what the accused learned from investigators, friends, or discovery (Greene et al., 2025).
This paper is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. The author is a psychologist, not an attorney; summaries of law are general and must be verified against current authority or with a licensed attorney.
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Legal Authorities
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).
Perry v. New Hampshire, 565 U.S. 228 (2012).
State v. Chapple, 135 Ariz. 281, 660 P.2d 1208 (1983).
State v. Dessureault, 104 Ariz. 380, 453 P.2d 951 (1969).
State v. Lindsey, 149 Ariz. 472, 720 P.2d 73 (1986).
State v. Moran, 151 Ariz. 378, 728 P.2d 248 (1986).
State v. Salazar-Mercado, 234 Ariz. 590, 325 P.3d 996 (2014).
United States v. Houser, 36 M.J. 392 (C.M.A. 1993).
Fed. R. Evid. 702.
Ariz. R. Evid. 403.
Ariz. R. Evid. 702.
Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004 (amending Ariz. R. Evid. 702, effective Jan. 1, 2024).
Mil. R. Evid. 321.
Mil. R. Evid. 702.
Mil. R. Evid. 1102.
Related topic papers: False Memory · External Sources of Memory Distortion · Source Monitoring · Suggestibility of Children’s Memory · Confidence and Accuracy · Remembering Changes Memory
Related topics from Arizona Forensic Services: Counterintuitive Testimony · Child Abuse Allegations · False Confessions: Suggestibility