Research published in Psychological Science suggests that three out of four people can be encouraged to form false memories of an event that didn't occur. A key ingredient in this process is softening the person up with accurate details and memories interspersed with the false.
This is very relevant to law and justice, where witnesses are understood to be prone to error. The experimental protocol included faulty memory-recovery techniques, now demonstrated to have a deleterious effect on accurate recall. Minimising the use of these fallible reconstructive modes of recollection in the interview setting would help avoid the creation of imagined events.
Although the study can only be strictly applied to individuals being coached by individuals, the theory that the inclusion of true facts made false ones appear more plausible could have a wider relevance to the dominant historical narrative of society; if true-seeming events can be patched together with enough pieces of truth, then why not values? This effect could conceivably descend all the way to founding myths, past lives, or original sin.
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