Disorganized Recall,Hypnotic Amnesia and Subjects' Faking: More Disconfirmatory Evidence

Abstract

Wagstaff hypothesized that subjects' faking may account for the disorganization in the clustering of recall that frequently accompanies suggested amnesia for a list of categorized words. According to this hypothesis subjects who learned a categorized word list will cluster inefficiently when they are explicitly instructed to pretend that they have forgotten some of the words. This hypothesis also predicts that subjects asked to mix up words from different categories during recall and simultaneously to recall only a specific number of the words will have difficulty carrying out both tasks. We present two experiments that tested both of these predictions and disconfirmed them both. Our findings are inconsistent with a faking hypothesis of hypnotic amnesia.