Social influence and mental routes to the production of authentic false memories and inauthentic false memories

•Results provide evidence for conceptual distinction in false memory research: authentic vs. inauthentic false memories.•Authentic false memories were accompanied by people's lack of awareness of the source of the false fact.•Inauthentic false memories were accompanied by people's awareness of the source of the false facts.

Two studies assessed the extent to which people incorporated false facts provided by bogus others into their own recognition memory reports, and how these false memory reports were affected by: (a) truth of the information in others' summaries supporting the false facts, (b) motivation to process stories and summaries, (c) source credibility, and (d) ease of remembering original facts. False memory report frequency increased when false facts in a summary were supported by true information and varied inversely with the ease with which original facts could be remembered. Results from a measure probing participants' memory perceptions suggest that some false memories are authentic: People sometimes lack awareness of both the incorporation of false facts into their memory reports and where the false facts came from. However, many false memories are inauthentic: Despite reporting a false memory, people sometimes retain knowledge of the original stimulus and/or the origin of false facts.