Steven Frenda

Presently I am a post-doctoral fellow at The New School for Social Research in NYC. My research focuses on social and suggestive influences on how we reconstruct memories of the past. Put simply, I study the causes and consequences of false memories in a variety of contexts (e.g., the criminal justice system, media, politics, and autobiographical memory).

In recent years, I have conducted research on how and when people can come to falsely remember fabricated political events that never happened. In other recent work, my collaborators and I have studied the effects of sleep deprivation on susceptibility to memory distortion in eyewitnesses, and the influence of sleep deprivation on the likelihood that someone will falsely confess to wrongdoing. These and other studies have been published in Psychological Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and others.