Do Cognitive Interview Instructions Contribute to False Beliefs and Memories? STEFANIE J. SHARMAN* and MARTINE B. POWELL Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia Abstract To examine whether exposing people to false events using instructions taken from the cognitive interview creates false beliefs and false memories, we conducted an experiment where participants took part in two sessions. First, they rated how confident they were that they had experienced certain childhood events and their memories of those events; they also rated how plausible they thought the events were. Second, 2 weeks later, participants were exposed to two of three false target events: one high, one moderate, and one low plausibility. For the first event, participants were instructed to either report everything or mentally reinstate the event context. For the second event, participants received both instructions. The third event was the control event about which participants received no instructions. Finally, participants rated their confidence and memories the second time. The results showed that the cognitive interview instructions had little to no effect on the development of false beliefs and false memories. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: false beliefs; false memories; cognitive interview Fifteen years of research has demonstrated that briefly exposing people to false childhood events makes them more confident that these events were real experiences (e.g. Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996; Sharman, Garry & Hunt, 2005). For example, in one study, Garry et al. (1996) asked participants to rate their confidence that a range of childhood events happened to them before the age of 10 years. Two weeks later, participants imagined some of the events that they had previously indicated had not hap- pened. Participants then rated their confidence the second time. They showed imagination inflation: participants were more confident that they had experienced the imagined events than the not-imagined control events. The Source Monitoring Framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993; Lindsay, 2008) suggests that people mistake the details that they imagined (visual details, sensory details, and information about people and locations) and the feeling of familiarity associated with the imagined false events for details of *Correspondence to: Stefanie J. Sharman, School of Psychology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, Melbourne, VIC 3125, Australia. E-mail: stefanie.sharman@deakin.edu.au Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling J. Investig. Psych. Offender Profil. 10: 114–124 (2013) Published online 8 August 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/jip.1371 Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.