Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred
by Elizabeth Loftus
Page 3
Source: http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/Imagine.htm
Table 1
Pretest answers for critical events
| Event | M | SD | Mdn | Range | Percent 1-4* |
| Got in trouble for calling 911. | 1.97 | 2.27 | 1.0 | 7 | 87 |
| Had to go to the emergency room late at night. | 4.58 | 2.95 | 5.0 | 7 | 45 |
| Found a $10 bill in a parking lot. | 2.47 | 2.20 | 1.0 | 7 | 79 |
| Won a stuffed animal at a carnival game. | 3.84 | 2.49 | 3.5 | 7 | 55 |
| Gave someone a haircut. | 2.66 | 2.22 | 1.0 | 7 | 76 |
| Had a lifeguard pull you out of the water. | 2.18 | 2.04 | 1.0 | 7 | 84 |
| Got stuck in a tree and had to have someone help you down. | 1.87 | 1.93 | 1.0 | 7 | 92 |
| Broke a window with your hand. | 2.13 | 2.03 | 1.0 | 7 | 89 |
| Overall | 2.71 | 2.44 | 1.0 | 7 | 76 |
*1-4, responses on the eight-itme scale indicating that a given event probably did not happen.
Procedure
Subjects participated in two sessions, in groups ranging from 1 to 10 each. In Session I, they were told that the experimenters were interested in how vividly and completely people could imagine events, and that they would complete the LEI to gather baseline data on how frequently these events actually occurred. Subjects then completed the LEI at their own pace.
In Session 2, 2 weeks later, the eight items were split into two, fourteen subsets. Subsets were randomly assigned to subjects, who were then asked to imagine the four critical items in that subset, while the other subset served as a control. For instance, Subject 1 imagined the four events in Subset A, and did not imagine the four events in Subset B; Subject 2 imagined the four events in Subset B but did not imagine the four events in Subset A. In both cases, items were imagined in specific steps.
Subjects were told that they would imagine some events that were described in packets that were on their desks. They were told that each page of the packet had a description of the events they were to imagine, as well as some questions about what they imagined. Subjects were instructed not to read ahead. Then the experimenter said,
You are going to imagine several events. Each time, you will read a brief description of an event. You will be given a few moments to picture the event, and then you will answer some questions about the image. You will be given more details to imagine, and then take a few moments to picture them. Then you will answer some questions about your image. Try to picture each event as clearly and completely as you can. It may help you to form a more complete mental picture if you include familiar places, people, and things in the imagined event. Also, close your eyes if that helps your imagination.
Subjects were asked if they had any questions about the instructions. When they were ready to begin, they turned over their packet and the experimenter began with the first event. First, the experimenter read a sentence or two to create the event setting: "Imagine that it's after school and you are playing in the house. You hear a strange noise outside, so you run to the window to see what made the noise. As you are running, your feet catch on something and you trip and fall." Subjects were given between 20 and 60 sec to imagine the event that each experimenter read. If the experimenter observed that all subjects in a given session had completed their imagination task at the end of 20 sec, the experimenter moved to the next phase. If, however, some subjects were still engaged in the imagination task, the experimenter waited until a maximum of 60 sec had passed. Subjects then wrote answers to short questions in their booklets. These questions were included to encourage compliance ("What did you trip on?"). The experimenter then read the action part of the event: "As you're falling you reach out to catch yourself and your hand goes through the window. As the window breaks you get cut and there's some blood." Subjects again completed short questions ( "What are you likely to do next?"). This basic procedure was repeated for all four target items, and lasted about 2 min per item. Then the experimenter pretended to be slightly panicked, told the subjects that their original LEls had been misplaced, and asked them to complete another copy. (No specific instruction was given as to whether subjects should fill it out as they had before.) In fact, this administration of the LEI was the posttest. Finally, subjects were debriefed.
Results
The primary question in this study is whether imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred. Before addressing this question, we need to expand on our hypothesis by distinguishing between childhood events judged unlikely to have happened versus childhood events judged likely to have happened. Our interest was in events that were unlikely to have happened, because in this condition subjects must be using their imaginations to create an alternate reality. On the other hand, if subjects are asked to imagine an event that they previously said had happened to them, they might simply be recalling it--not imagining it. Recent research suggests that when subjects imagine something that actually did happen to them, the imagining task actually becomes a remembering task (Sarbin, 1995). Thus. we focused first and foremost on what happens when people imagine an event, not when they recall one.
We now turn our attention to events that were judged as unlikely to have happened, confining our analysis to the initial "did not happen" responses. These pretest responses constitute 76% of the total data; put another way, each subject reported that roughly 6/8 critical items probably did not happen (responses of 1-4). Of course, the eight critical items differed in how likely they were to produce a 1-4 response. A high of 92% of subjects responded in the 1-4 range for "Got stuck in a tree and had to have someone help you down," while 45% produced a 1-4 response to "Had to go to the emergency room late at night.'' Across all items. the mean number of subjects who initially said an event did not happen was 29 (74%), and the median was 31 (80%).
To determine if imagination caused these subjects to become more confident that an event had occurred, we examined whether subjects moved up or down the scale. We calculated. for each critical item, the percentage of subjects whose responses increased, decreased, or did not change from the first to the second administration of the LEI test. We collapsed these change scores across all subjects and items, and display them separately according to whether or not the critical event was imagined. These data, for the 112 imagined items and 119 not imagined items, are shown in Figure 1 . Of particular interest are the positive change scores, which indicate that subjects move in the direction of becoming more confident that the event had happened to them.
Figure 1. Percent of events staying the same, increasing, and decreasing for subjects who initially responded 1 to 4 (responses indicating that the critical items probably did not happen).
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