Abstract

Abstract In eyewitness testimony experiments examining the effect of misinformation on subjects' memory of a target event, the misinformation is not usually attributed to a particular person. Under these circumstances the misinformation effect may occur because subjects attribute the misleading information to the experimenter and become susceptible to demand and social influence factors. In contrast, the source monitoring hypothesis claims that subjects are misled when they fail to remember the source of the misinformation. When a reversed eyewitness design (Lindsay & Johnson, 1989) was used, the subjects were equally misled, whether the misinformation was unattributed, whether it was attributed to the experimenter or whether it was attributed to an experimental subject. The results of this experiment support the source monitoring hypothesis.