False Memories of Fabricated News Events in India
An experiment about how information shapes our cognition
Artist Al Hopwood has collaborated with experimental psychologist Steven Frenda to produce an experiment that asks if fabricated news stories can create false memories of past events. From 1st April to 8th May 2022 Frenda and Hopwood presented a survey to visitors of Psyche that claimed to "examine the public’s thoughts and perspectives on news and current events” in order to "understand how people think about news events in relation to their everyday lives”.
In reality, the survey presented two entirely invented news items and eight real reports from the Indian press. The participants were initially unaware of this deception and were required to complete a form indicating their political preferences and what they remembered from each event. All participants were then fully briefed about the purpose of the study and asked to guess which stories were false. The results of the study will it is hoped give some insight into how our pre-existing beliefs influence false memories of fake events.
Read more about this psychology experiment here.
Medium: Psychology experiment, online survey, found digital photography, text.
Year: 2022
Team
Al Hopwood
Artist
Al Hopwood is an award winning artist, writer and curator. He has made moving image, performance and exhibition projects with major international galleries including Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, ICA London, Wellcome Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum and Mona (Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania). He has collaborated extensively with actors, filmmakers, writers, magicians, musicians, comedians, designers, cognitive psychologists, academics and scientists. He was Arts Editor of the style magazine Sleazenation and he's written extensively for Art Review. In 2013 he was the first visual artist to be awarded a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship and in 2019 he co-curated Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic at Wellcome Collection. He's worked under a number of different guises over the years including the fictional self help company WITH, WITH TV and A.R. Hopwood.
Steven Frenda
Psychologist
Steven Frenda is a psychologist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles in the Psychology Department. He earned a Ph.D. in psychological science from the University of California, Irvine in 2014, spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at The New School for Social Research in New York City, and then joined the faculty at CSULA in 2016. His research focuses on suggestibility and memory distortion in legal contexts, autobiographical memory, and memories for public news events. His work has been published in high-impact scientific journals (such as The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Psychological Science), and has appeared in reports by major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and National Public Radio.
