Is It Always the Gaslighter's Fault?

The person who gaslights you can create confusion, anxiety, and self-doubt when they claim an alternate reality to experiences you know to be true. Perhaps you’re romantically involved with a person who, though usually reliable, fails to show up at an important family event. “No,” they insist, “I told you I couldn’t make it.” However, not only did they promise to come, but they also said they were looking forward to it. Infuriated with their deception, you consider breaking off the relationship.

This example of gaslighting may pale in comparison to other cases you’ve heard of in which people deny entire chunks of the history they’ve shared with their partner. However, it does raise the question of the role of memory in the recollection of important relationship events.

The Evidence for False Memory

There are many cases that have reached the media in which the veracity of a memory involving a criminal act has come into question. Whether or not these cases have validity, the fact remains that investigators find it remarkably easy to insert false memories into a research participant’s brain. If this is the case, might it not be possible that at least some gaslighting is just a case of false memory production? When someone’s recall of an event is different from yours, and you have the facts to back you up (e.g., texts or voicemail messages), could it be that the other person’s memory trace has led them down the wrong pathway through the past?

According to a newly published study by Catholic University of Leuven’s Paul Riesthuis and colleagues (2022), false memories can occur for a variety of reasons, but high on the list of possibilities is what’s called “forced fabrication.” In the lab, researchers study this process by asking a participant to guess an answer even if they didn’t know it for sure. Guaranteeing that the guess would represent a false memory, this question is one for which there couldn’t possibly be an answer. For example, they might show a video clip and then ask participants about details that weren’t shown at all such as the color of a shirt person X was wearing, when person X never appeared in the video. The participant, forced to guess, might say “green.”

After a delay of as long as a week, the participants are brought back into the lab and asked, "Where did you learn about the fact that the shirt was green?" This was, of course, their own false memory. Instead of saying they made it up because they had to guess at something, participants would assert that their knowledge came from the video. If it’s so easy to implant a fabricated memory in the lab, where there are no emotional components, it’s a small leap to imagine how people can recall their made-up memories in real life.

Putting False Memories to a Rigorous Test

The Belgian researchers, noting some of the limitations of previous research (i.e., being too overtly suggestive) decided to adapt a more rigorous method borrowed from experimental paradigms in which false memories are more implicitly inserted into a participant’s mind. In what’s called the “DRM” paradigm (named after its inventors, Deese, Roediger, and McDermott), a researcher presents a list of words that all come from the same category but do not include the category name. As an example, Riesthuis et al. used this collection of DRM-type words: “symphony, sound, piano, radio, sing, orchestra,” which participants read out loud as they were presented to them on the screen. Then, they completed a brief arithmetic test.

The forced fabrication phase of the experiment, new to this particular study, involved showing participants, next, a list of six words with the instruction: “You have to indicate which two words were shown on the previous list and also lie about seeing two additional words. To remain credible towards the experimenter, it would be best if you indicate two words that are related to the previously shown six words.” Such a related word might, as you can expect, be “music.”

The results, based on the undergraduate participants who completed these and other tasks online, were consistent with predictions, showing that, even in a single session across a one-hour period, people can be fooled by their own lies into believing them to be true.

The authors had expected, however, that they could also demonstrate a “spreading activation effect” of falsely remembered words such that people would also recall as true their memory for words related to the key targets (e.g., remembering not only “music” but also “piano”).

The main finding, in the words of the authors, supported the study’s primary predictions that “forcing people to fabricate might lead them to form false memories about their own fabrications” (p. 6).

What the Findings Mean for the Gaslighter

Reinforcing the long tradition of research on false memories, the Belgian investigators have added to the literature the new finding that fabrications of events that didn’t occur can take place even under rigorous control with nonemotional stimuli. If this process is so insidious that it can be demonstrated within a brief period of a single research study, how much more plausible is it that false fabrication can occur when there’s more at stake than simply performance in a lab?

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Thinking back on your partner’s assertion that they informed you about their inability to attend the event, you might now consider the possibility that they created the memory of having told you and, once having created it, believe it to be true. Then, you could ask yourself how many times this has happened to you where you were the victim of your own false memory.

Perhaps someone asked you how much you paid for the smartwatch you bought yourself over a year ago. Honestly, you can’t really recall the exact price, so you guesstimate an amount that seems as though it might be close enough. A week later, you see an ad for a new version of that smartwatch and, as you figure out whether it’s worth it or not, remember the price as the one you guesstimated. Take an inventory of how many times you incorrectly recalled something you said or did, only to find that someone else challenges you—and, worse, have the data to prove it.

Clearly, not all gaslighters dabble in false memories due to innocent lapses such as these. However, if this occurs with someone you usually trust, perhaps you should wait before deciding you can never again rely on them.

To sum up, memory can be a fragile entity, easily waylaid by a combination of time and faulty storage. Allowing people some latitude in their own memory frailty can be an important step in maintaining the health of the relationships you wish to preserve.

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