Case File 079 · Investigation and Psychology

What Is the Difference Between a Lie and a False Memory?

A lie and a false memory can produce the same wrong statement, but only the liar knows it is untrue.

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished 16 September 2026Updated 16 September 2026

The difference between a lie and a false memory is belief. A lie is a statement the speaker knows is untrue and says in order to mislead. A false memory is a recollection of something that did not happen, or did not happen that way, which the person sincerely believes. Both can produce the same wrong statement, and both can be told with confidence and detail. But the liar knows the truth and is hiding it, while the person with a false memory is reporting what they genuinely remember. Memory researchers, including Elizabeth Loftus, have shown that false memories can be created in ordinary people through suggestion, imagination and even simple word lists. That is why an honest witness can be completely wrong, and why looking for signs of lying cannot catch a mistake the speaker does not know they are making.

Key takeaways

A lie requires knowing the truth and intending to mislead; a false memory is sincerely believed.
False memories can be produced in the laboratory, from single words in the DRM paradigm to whole childhood events.
False memories can be confident, detailed and emotional, so those qualities do not prove a memory is true.
Researchers Bernstein and Loftus argue it may be virtually impossible to tell whether a particular memory is true without independent corroboration.
Treating every false statement as a lie risks accusing honest people; treating every lie as a mistake risks being fooled.

What exactly is the difference?

The two are defined by what is going on in the speaker's mind, not by whether the statement is accurate.

Question	Lie	False memory
Is the statement false?	Yes	Yes, in whole or in part
Does the speaker believe it?	No	Yes
Is there intent to mislead?	Yes	No
Can confidence and detail be high?	Yes	Yes
What catches it?	Checking facts, and inconsistencies a liar struggles to maintain	Mainly independent evidence

In their 2009 paper on telling true from false memories, Daniel Bernstein and Elizabeth Loftus draw the same line. Some people lie intentionally, for all kinds of reasons. Others report something false while believing they are telling the truth, which the authors describe as a false belief or a false memory. They note that catching the two may require different approaches. A deliberate liar has to keep a false story going, and one lie can lead to others. A person with a false memory has nothing to keep track of, because they are simply describing what they remember.

How do false memories form?

Memory is reconstructive. When we remember, we rebuild an event from stored traces, general knowledge and information we have picked up since. In a 1993 review in Psychological Bulletin, Johnson, Hashtroudi and Lindsay described how people judge where a memory came from, whether something was seen, heard about, imagined or inferred. These source-monitoring judgments are based on the qualities of the experience, and they are subject to error.

When those judgments go wrong, something that was only suggested, imagined or inferred can be experienced as something that was witnessed. For a wider look at this process, see why memory is not a perfect recording.

What is the DRM paradigm?

The DRM paradigm is one of the simplest ways to create a false memory in a laboratory. It is named after Deese, whose 1959 study it builds on, and Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott, who developed it in 1995.

Participants study lists of related words, such as bed, rest and awake. Every word on the list is associated with one word that is never presented, in this case sleep. Roediger and McDermott found that:

in their first experiment, the missing word was recalled 40% of the time on immediate free recall tests, and was later recognised with high confidence;
in their second experiment, with an expanded set of lists, the false recall rate reached 55%;
on a later recognition test, false alarms to the missing words occurred at a rate comparable to correct recognition of words that had actually been studied.

No one in these studies had any reason to lie. They were confidently reporting words they believed they had seen, which is exactly what makes the finding useful: it shows how easily honest recall can include things that were never there.

Can people remember whole events that never happened?

Yes, though not everyone does. Loftus's 2005 review describes how research on misinformation, meaning misleading information encountered after an event, developed into studies showing that people can come to believe they experienced rich, complex events that never occurred.

The best-known method is often called the "lost in the mall" paradigm, in which researchers suggest a false childhood event to participants alongside true ones. Because studies used different methods and definitions, estimates varied widely. In 2017, Scoboria and colleagues pooled memory reports from eight published implantation studies (423 participants) and coded them using the same criteria:

30.4% of cases were classified as false memories;
another 23% were classified as accepting the suggested event to some degree;
when the suggestion included self-relevant information and an imagination procedure, and was not accompanied by a photo of the event, the rate was 46.1%.

Definitions matter here. A 2015 study by Shaw and Porter reported that 70% of participants formed false memories of committing a crime after three suggestive interviews. In a 2018 commentary, Wade, Garry and Pezdek recoded the data to separate believing a suggestion from remembering it, and found 26–30% met the criteria for false memories. Believing something happened and "remembering" it are not the same thing, and both are different again from lying.

Do false memories feel different from real ones?

Often not enough to tell them apart. Laney and Loftus (2008) planted false memories of emotional childhood events and compared them with other participants' true memories. On most emotional dimensions, true and false memories were indistinguishable. On a few measures, true memories were more emotional on average, but true and false memories were equally likely to be rated as uniformly emotional. The authors concluded that even substantial emotional content may not reliably indicate that a memory is accurate.

Bernstein and Loftus note that real memories, on average, contain more sensory, spatial and temporal detail. But averages across groups do not settle an individual case, and they point out that suggestion and imagination can make a false memory feel and appear real. Their overall conclusion is that it may be virtually impossible to tell reliably whether a particular memory is true or false without independent corroboration.

Can lie detection tell the two apart?

Not in principle, and not well in practice. Approaches to detecting deception look for differences between people who are lying and people who believe what they are saying. Someone with a false memory falls into the second group.

Even for deliberate lies, human judgement is weak. A meta-analysis by Bond and DePaulo (2006) found people average about 54% accuracy when judging lies and truths, only slightly better than chance. A separate meta-analysis by DePaulo and colleagues (2003) found that many behaviours showed no link, or only weak links, to deception. See why there is no single reliable sign of deception and can you actually tell when someone is lying? for more.

This creates a double risk. An investigator who treats every false statement as a lie may accuse an honest witness who is simply mistaken. An investigator who accepts sincerity as proof of accuracy may rely on a confident account that is wrong.

Why does the distinction matter in an investigation?

Because the right response is different. A suspected lie is usually tested by checking facts and looking for points where a false story cannot be sustained. A suspected false memory calls for a look at how the memory might have been shaped: what the person was told, how they were questioned, what they imagined or discussed afterwards. Suggestive questioning is one route, which is why how repeated questioning can affect memory matters here.

In both cases, the most dependable test is the same: independent evidence that does not rely on anyone's memory. Real statements can also mix the two, with honest errors sitting alongside deliberate omissions, so a single mistake does not tell you which kind of statement you are dealing with. The same caution applies to research on why innocent people sometimes confess.

Is there a game about telling mistakes from lies?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative-driven interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia. It is inspired by real police footage and psychological interviews, and asks players to examine unreliable stories rather than trust any single account.

The lie-versus-false-memory problem is a good way to think about that kind of game. A statement that does not fit the evidence might be fabrication, or it might be an honest person misremembering. Behaviour is not proof either way. The press kit names Fabrication alongside Avoidance, Narrative Gaps and Emotional Leakage among the behaviours the game focuses on, and development screenshots show a case select screen that includes a "not guilty" result.

Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027. Read How Murder Book Turns Interrogation Into Gameplay to learn more.