Abstract
Original article: Shaw, J., & Porter, S. (2015). Constructing rich false memories of committing crime. Psychological Science, 26, 291–301. doi:10.1177/0956797614562862
When the Shaw and Porter (2015) data set was shared with Nicholas J. L. Brown and James A. J. Heathers, they brought to the authors’ attention that the original article contained some incorrect calculations. For a couple of the calculations, incorrect cells had been included in the analysis. Also, Microsoft Excel was used for these calculations, which yielded imprecise results for rounding of values and for confidence intervals. Table 1 lists all of the corrections that are being made to the article.
Comparison of Values From the Original Analysis (Shaw & Porter, 2015) and the Recalculated Analysis
Note: Boldface indicates values that have changed substantially (by more than a raw value of .5) between the original analysis and the reanalysis. CI = confidence interval.
Main Findings
Only one finding of interest in the original article was nonsignificant in the corrected analysis: The article reported that “participants were found to be significantly more likely to report adopting multiple perspectives (i.e., being able to see themselves in the memory as well as to see things from their own perspective) in the true than in the false memory” (pp. 297–298); however, as shown in Table 1, that difference was not significant in the corrected analysis. Other changes of note include the following. The mean number of total details recalled for false memories was 64.95 (not 71.76). This was because incorrect cells were included in the original calculation of the details for participants told they had committed assault and assault with a weapon. The mean number of details recalled for assault was 66.25 (not 75.63), and the mean number of details recalled for assault with a weapon was 62.29 (not 71.29).
All Data
Calculations in Table 1 show the differences that emerged between the values reported in the original article and the new analysis. As can be seen, many of the values (particularly the confidence intervals) have changed slightly. Values that have changed substantially (by more than a raw value of .5) have been boldfaced. Values from the original manuscript that are not included here did not change after the reanalysis.
Acknowledgments
J. Shaw would like to thank Nicholas J. L. Brown and James A. J. Heathers for alerting her to inconsistencies in some of the results reported in the article. She would also like to thank Davut Akca for helping with the calculations involved in this reanalysis.