In short
Suggestibility is the degree to which a person takes on information supplied by someone else, a question, a leading phrase or a confident bystander, and later reports it as part of their own memory or judgment. This page is about suggestibility as a property of people, measured by how far different individuals move under the same pressure; the laboratory phenomenon it produces in almost everyone is covered separately under the misinformation effect.
How suggestibility works
A memory is not retrieved whole from storage; it is assembled, and anything that arrives between the event and the recall can be built into the assembly. A question is one of those arrivals. "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other" does not only ask about speed. It asserts that there was a smash, and that assertion is in the person's mind at the moment they are reconstructing the scene. By the time an answer comes out, the question's premise and the witnessed detail are hard to tell apart.
Separating the two requires source monitoring: keeping track of where each piece of a recollection came from. Source monitoring is the part that fails first. People are good at remembering content and poor at remembering its origin, which is why a detail picked up from a leading question, a news report or another witness can come back later feeling like something that was seen. The person is not lying and usually cannot tell.
Where this page differs from the misinformation effect is the level of description. The misinformation effect is a fact about situations: give enough people a misleading question and the group's reports shift. Suggestibility is a fact about people: under the same pressure, some move a long way and some barely move. Gisli Gudjonsson built scales in the 1980s to measure one version of it, interrogative suggestibility, by reading a story, asking leading questions about it, telling the person their answers were wrong, and measuring both how far they yielded and how far they shifted after the criticism. Scores vary widely between individuals and predict who changes an account under questioning.
The word is used for two other things that are worth keeping apart. Hypnotic suggestibility is a separate measured trait, the degree to which someone responds to suggestions in a hypnotic procedure, and it correlates only modestly with the interrogative kind. In everyday speech, suggestible is also used loosely to mean gullible, which is about accepting claims rather than about memory. The research sense on this page is narrower: what a person does with information delivered after the event.
The original study
Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer published "Reconstruction of automobile destruction" in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior in 1974. In the first experiment, 45 students watched seven short films of traffic accidents and after each one answered questions about what they had seen. The critical question asked how fast the cars were going when they hit each other, with the verb varied between groups: smashed, collided, bumped, hit or contacted.
The verb moved the estimate. The mean was 40.8 miles per hour for smashed, 39.3 for collided, 38.1 for bumped, 34.0 for hit and 31.8 for contacted. Every group had watched the same films, and the films had fixed speeds, so the difference came entirely from the word in the question.
Read the diagram and evidence as text
Identical accident-film pictograms feed different question bubbles: hit has a quiet impact cue and smashed an emphatic one. Mean speed labels are 34.0 and 40.8 mph. The estimate diamonds show ordering only; their spacing is not a speed scale. Question pictograms illustrate the verbs and are not additional stimuli.
Same films, one word changed in the question
Means as labels, not bars; the page's subject is how far each person moves
What the students saw: The same films of accidents, at fixed speeds, for every group
The question's premise: “…when they smashed into each other” or “…when they hit each other”
Reported speed: Smashed: 40.8 mph. Hit: 34.0 mph.
Checking the source: Was the smash seen, or supplied by the question? Source monitoring fails first
What the students saw → what was seen → Reported speed
The question's premise → the premise enters the answer → Reported speed (error transition)
| Condition | Value and unit | Evidence quote |
|---|---|---|
| Asked with the word smashed | 40.8 miles per hour, mean estimate | gave a mean estimate of 40.8 miles per hour |
| Asked the identical question with the word hit | 34.0 miles per hour, mean estimate | students asked the identical question with the word hit gave 34.0 |
The second experiment tested whether the wording changed what people later reported having seen. A hundred and fifty students watched a film of a multiple car accident. Fifty were asked the speed question with smashed, fifty with hit, and fifty were asked no speed question at all. A week later, all of them were asked whether they had seen any broken glass. There was none in the film. Sixteen of the fifty in the smashed group said they had, against seven of fifty in the hit group and six of fifty in the control group.
Two limits belong with those numbers. The groups were small, and speed estimates from a film are imprecise, so the first experiment shows a reliable shift in reported speed rather than a precise measure of it. And the broken glass result, while consistent with the memory being altered, is also consistent with a person who has been told the crash was severe making a reasonable inference about what a severe crash leaves behind. Loftus has treated the distinction as an open question in later reviews. What is not in dispute is that the wording of a question changes what is reported afterward.
Everyday examples
Suggestion arrives in ordinary language, usually from someone who has no intention of planting anything.
| Situation | What the bias does | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| Two witnesses talk before giving statements | Details from one account turn up in the other and are then reported as firsthand | Take separate statements before anyone compares notes, and record who said what first |
| A doctor asks whether the pain is sharp or burning | The two offered words crowd out the patient's own description and get written into the record | Ask what the pain is like before offering any adjectives |
| A survey asks how annoying a delay was rather than how it was | The premise sets the scale and the answers cluster where the question pointed | Use neutral wording and keep the response options symmetric |
| A family member fills in a gap in your story every time it is told | Their detail becomes part of your memory of the event after a few retellings | Write your own version down once, before the story has been told many times |
| A manager asks a team member whether they felt undermined | The word supplies an interpretation that the person then recalls having felt | Ask what happened and what it was like, then stop talking |
How to counter it
Suggestibility is mostly managed by changing how questions are asked, since that is where the suggestion enters.
- Ask open questions first. "Tell me what happened" collects an account that nobody has shaped. Specific questions come after, and they come with their premises checked.
- Keep the verbs out. Smashed, undermined, panicked and refused are interpretations. Use the plainest word available and let the other person supply the strong one if it belongs.
- Record early. The first written version of an account is the only one that has not been through a conversation.
- Keep witnesses apart. Co-witness discussion is one of the strongest routes to shared detail that nobody actually saw.
- Treat confidence as separate from accuracy. A detail acquired after the event can be held with as much confidence as one that was witnessed, and often with more, because it has been rehearsed.
- Notice when you are being asked a leading question, and answer the question that was not asked. "I do not know how fast; I can tell you what I saw" is a complete answer.
What it is not
Several entries on the codex deal with memory being edited after the fact. They differ in whether the subject is the person, the situation or the memory itself. Nothing on this page can establish whether a particular memory is accurate.
- It is not the misinformation effect, which is the situational phenomenon: supply a group with misleading post-event information and their reports shift. Suggestibility is the individual difference in how far a given person shifts, and it is measured with scales rather than with a group comparison.
- It is not false memory, which is the product rather than the process. A false memory can arise with no suggestion at all, as in word lists where people recall a related word that was never presented.
- It is not source confusion, which is misremembering where a piece of information came from. Source confusion is the failure that lets a suggestion be filed as a memory, so it is the mechanism rather than the trait.
Tests and tools that use this
Related biases
Suggestibility FAQ
What is suggestibility in psychology?
It is the degree to which a person takes on information from outside, a leading question, another witness, a confident expert, and later reports it as their own memory or judgment. It is measured as an individual difference: under the same pressure, some people shift a long way and others hardly move. The research separates memory suggestibility, interrogative suggestibility and hypnotic suggestibility.
What did Loftus and Palmer find in 1974?
Students watched films of traffic accidents and were asked how fast the cars were going, with one verb varied between groups. Mean estimates ran from 40.8 miles per hour for smashed down to 31.8 for contacted, from identical films. A week later, students who had read smashed were more than twice as likely as a control group to report broken glass that was never in the film.
How does the demo on this page work?
Your browser is assigned one of two wordings of the same question, kept in session storage so a reload shows the same one. You pick a speed band. The result screen shows the other wording in full and, once each version has 50 responses, the split for both side by side. The original used film clips; this page uses a written description, so the numbers are not comparable.
Is being suggestible a weakness?
No. It is a measured difference, like reaction time, and it tracks things such as memory capacity, how much a person trusts the questioner and how much pressure the situation carries. The same openness that makes someone easy to lead also makes them easy to teach. What matters practically is that interviews are arranged so that a suggestible account is not mistaken for an independent one.
Are some people more suggestible than others?
Yes, and the differences are large. Gisli Gudjonsson's interrogative suggestibility scales measure two components: how far someone yields to leading questions and how far they shift their answers after being told they were wrong. Scores vary widely between individuals. Hypnotic suggestibility is a separate measured trait and correlates with the interrogative kind only modestly.
How do interviewers avoid leading a witness?
By opening with a free account and only then asking specific questions, by keeping interpretive verbs out of the questions, by not signaling which answer is expected, by recording the interview, and by keeping witnesses from discussing the event with each other first. These practices come straight out of the research on post-event information and are now standard in investigative interview training.
References
- Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585-589. doi.org
- Gudjonsson, G. H. (1984). A new scale of interrogative suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 5(3), 303-314. doi.org
- Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361-366. doi.org
- Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1993). Suggestibility of the child witness: A historical review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 113(3), 403-439. doi.org
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, October 21). Suggestibility. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/biases/suggestibility