Bruck and Ceci reaction
...g has on a young child’s recollection of an event. I think this article was written to prove, in a time when many child sexual abuse cases were in the courts, that the method of questioning could seriously skewe the child’s recollection of the truth. In bringing up the many different strategies of questioning that reshape and direct a child’s recollection of a traumatic event (e.g. repeating misinformation, emotional atmospherics, subtle suggestive influences, multiple suggestive techniques), the question of whether the generated reports are false beliefs prompted by social compliance and inherent trust that children show toward adults, or are a result of the effects of suggestibility on the malleable memory of young children’s budding cognitive systems is brought up. They answer this question satisfactorily using empirical data. For example, when children are asked the same question twice, they change their answers to please the adult interviewer (Huges & Grieve1980). Also, when asked nonsensical questions, the majority of five and seven year olds answered “yes” or “no” and rarely replied “I don’t know” which implies that they provided a random or fabricated response to please the interviewer even if they did not comprehend the question (Siegal et al.1988). These experiments show that young children consciously submit t...