Suppose a high school junior visits her sister’s college dorm room for the first time. She’s never been to a dorm before, but she’s seen dorms in movies, read about them, and heard her friends talking about them. When she describes the room to another friend after the visit, she comments on how many clothes her sister had and how many huge books were on her sister’s desk. In reality, the books were hidden under the bed, not out in the open. The clothes were something she actually saw, while the books were part of her dorm-room schema.

After witnessing a car crash on the freeway, Sam later tells friends many details about what he saw. It turns out, however, that there is no way he could have actually seen some of the details he described and that he is, in fact, just reporting details he heard on TV about the accident. He isn’t deliberately lying. He just may not be able to remember where all the different pieces of information came from.

A bank robber enters a crowded bank in the middle of the day, brandishing a gun. He shoots out the security cameras and terrifies everyone. He is taking money from a teller when one of two security guards approaches the robber, draws his own weapon, and shoots. Suddenly, another shot is fired from a different direction and the security guard falls to the ground, shot. Some of the customers see that the other security guard, who was approaching the robber from the other side, mistakenly shot his partner. Later, police ask the witnesses when the robber shot the guard, and they report that he shot after the guard fired on him. Even though they saw one guard shoot the other, they are swayed by the misinformation given by the police.

In one of Loftus’s early experiments, she showed research subjects a film of a simulated automobile accident at an intersection with a stop sign. Afterward, she told half the subjects that there was a yield sign at the intersection. When asked later to describe the accident, those who had received the misleading suggestion tended to claim with certainty that there was a yield sign at the intersection, while those subjects who received no misleading suggestions had a more accurate recollection.

Tina asks her father to tell her all about the day she was born: when her mother first went into labor, how long it took to get to the hospital, what time of day or night it was. Tina’s father tells her a wonderful story about how he and her mother made a late night rush to the hospital the night of Thursday, the twelfth, and how Tracy’s mother barely made it into the delivery room before Tracy emerged, and how the doctor kindly put 11:59 p.m. as the time of birth to avoid a Friday the thirteenth birthday. Years later, when glancing at an old calendar, Tracy discovers she was actually born on a Tuesday, not a Thursday.

Steve is in his early twenties, and he and a roommate have just moved to New York City. Steve has all sorts of interesting experiences. One night, he goes out to a local pub and meets Robert De Niro, who is just sitting there eating a hamburger. The two of them chat about baseball for a while and even shoot a game of pool. Later, Steve tells his roommate about the evening. Many years later, Steve and his old roommate get together to talk about old times, and the roommate relates the “De Niro story” as if it happened to him.