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>Usually the interviewer is a calm and dispassionate Columbo type who asks clarifying questions and then lets the suspects slowly trap themselves in their own web of lies.

This loses its ability to inspire awe when you watch a video of one of these where you know the subject is actually innocent and the interviewer manages to also catch them in their own web of lies and make them look and sound guilty.



Academia has reproduced this result a fair bit: under interrogation it's very easy to convince people to admit to events happening which didn't. Eyewitness testimony is thus intensely unreliable - and psychologically as far as can be told, the act of remembering something makes the memory itself labile - i.e. you rewrite a memory as you recall it.

So rounds of intense questioning on the same subject infect any recollection of the experience someone has - amplifying or even adding events which didn't exist due to the focus of it.

And this has very real consequences - it was one of the driving forces of the satanic panic in in the 1980s[1] - for which people went to jail on the basis of "recovered memories".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic




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