As soon as Elizabeth Loftus came up in our readings this week, I knew what my blog topic would be.
Our lesson for the week covers Loftus’ research in how the wording of a question can affect the recalled memory, but what she’s probably best-known for is her work on the creation of false memories, with her ‘lost in the mall’ experiment where subjects were presented with three true events and one false, then asked to write down what they recalled of each event. 19 out of the 24 subjects were able to correctly identify the false memory two weeks later. (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995)
As a special education teacher and a cognitive and neuropsych student, the process of encoding and recalling memories is a fascinating one to me and Loftus inspired one of my favourite high school group projects: a staged altercation that our whole AP Psychology class witnessed, then had to write down a witness report of once our teacher returned to the room. Once they were done, the two of us who had pretended to fight returned and our group then asked the class to describe what they had seen. I remember being surprised there was a fair bit of argument about several of the details, both large and small ones, as we had used Asch’s study to predict that the class members would conform, but we’d apparently forgotten the bit about group power being reduced once someone is willing to speak up in disagreement. (Asch, 1951) After the group came to something of a consensus, we revealed the third teammate who had been recording the altercation and played the video for everyone, revealing that no one had been 100% accurate.
The above image is the basic memory encoding process. The one below is what we know about the process due to Loftus’ research.
Fast-forward about two decades to the day I rediscovered Loftus – and not for the best of reasons. The link to the interview can be found in the references, but while it’s a fascinating one, it also comes with trigger warnings, so please handle with care.
I still remember my gut feeling of betrayal when I found out she had testified for the defense in Harvey Weinstein’s trial, though as I began to read the article in The New Yorker, I found myself reconsidering that knee-jerk reaction. On the one hand, I’m the daughter of a retired police officer and DoJ instructor and the belief that everyone deserves justice and a fair trial is a core tenet of my family’s values; on the other, I’m a survivor of assault myself who chose not to report because I knew the uphill battle I would face just to be believed. I didn’t even tell my parents until ten years after it happened, which was deliberately well after the statue of limitations had run out. My father has spent his entire life devoted to the pursuit of justice, even walking away from a 20+ year career rather than be silent in the face of injustice, I couldn’t let him see that very system fail his daughter. I saw myself in Loftus’ brother’s response to the author of the article: ‘Here these women are blossoming into a world in which people are finally going to listen to them, and then they’re going to have some professor on the stand—someone they’ve never met before—tell the jury that they can’t be believed.’ (Aviv, 2021)
So how was I going to reconcile those two vastly different perspectives, the justice-seeker and the survivor? Which one would win out? My cognitive dissonance felt almost overwhelming as I kept reading and I knew there weren’t going to be any easy answers.
What stopped me in my tracks was a single line in parentheses: ‘The chance of misidentification is greatest when the witness is white and the defendant is Black.’ (Aviv, 2021). Our textbook goes into greater detail of the various ways in which the justice system is flawed and how to make improvements using social as well as cognitive psychology, but seeing the truth stated that simply just hit me in a way the textbook hadn’t. In that moment, the justice-seeker won a very uncomfortable victory: as horrible and intrusive and traumatising as it is to have your very memories questioned, if I truly believe in ‘justice for all’, that everyone is entitled to not only a defense, but a qualified one, then I have to accept that while I can (and do) hate it with every fibre of my being, this is part of the process.
I had a professor once start the term with the best definition of history I’ve ever heard: ‘history is an interpretation of the past, for the present.’ I wonder if that might be applied to memory, too.
Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.
Aviv, R., 2021. How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-loftus-changed-the-meaning-of-memory> [Accessed 12 October 2022].
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2016). Applied social psychology : Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE Publications, Incorporated.
Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720–725. https://doi.org/10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07
I really enjoyed reading your blog post as I find the creation of false memories and the process of encoding memories to be fascinating. It is interesting to think about how unreliable our memories can be and I often wonder if some of the things I “remember” are things that actually happened (or how they happened). Sometimes I dream so vividly that I have even struggled to accurately recall whether a memory is based in reality or if it is simply a dream that I am recounting. It can be upsetting to know that our memories do not always serve us well, but it is also very intriguing and provides us with an incredibly important piece of information when considering things that rely heavily on memory, such as testimonies. I think being aware of the fault of our memories is essential in helping us to recognize false memories more accurately and understanding that we may not be recalling events perfectly.
I read a study on false memory in completing research for a discussion post this week. This study focused specifically on how, in a controlled experimental setting, researchers were able to plant false memories of committing a crime in 70% of participants (Shaw & Porter, 2015)! It seems that we could improve a lot of areas in life if we considered how our memories can be manipulated. For example, with this knowledge, we could ensure proper procedures are being used and avoid ones that encourage false memory formation (ex. the Reid Technique). At best, false memory can lead to funny stories, and at worst, they can lead to false confessions and convictions. It is crucial that we recognize the impacts that may come with the unreliability of our memories so we can try to avoid them.
Reference
Shaw, J., & Porter, S. (2015). Constructing Rich false memories of committing crime. Psychological Science, 26(3), 291–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614562862
This post reminds me of the lessons taught in my cognitive psychology class last semester. Memory is such a detailed area part of cognitive psychology that it took multiple chapters to cover. We also learned about Elizabeth Loftus and the misinformation effect. The misinformation effect is when misleading information appears to the individual who has witnessed an event and causes them to change initial statements later. The Reid Technique and other investigative interviews used by police agencies is great example on how misleading postevent information (MPI) can occur due to suggestion. Elizabeth Loftus experiments showed that false memories can be created. In the court room, jurors believe eye witness testimonies are extremely accurate but that isn’t the case. Interestingly, according to a study done by Claudia Stanny and Thomas Johnson, when there is a weapon involved, an eye witness is able to identify the events better when the weapon didn’t fire. When a weapon does fire, the details of an event become unclear (Goldstein, 2021). I’m sorry about the situation you went through and I hope you had the opportunity to heal even if your abuser wasn’t bought to justice.
References:
Goldstein, E. B. (2021). Everyday Memory and Memory Errors . In Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (pp. 206–231). essay, Cengage.