Story stimuli for creating false beliefs about the world.

Abstract

Fiction is not always accurate, and this has consequences for readers. In laboratory studies, the reading of short stories led participants to produce story errors as facts on a later test of general knowledge (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). The present article describes these story stimuli in detail, so that interested researchers will be able to use the stimuli and change them as needed for particular research projects. This article provides instructions for using the stories and suggestions for modifying them; it is a manual for one way of creating suggestibility. The full set of stories and reading comprehension questions may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.