The experiment we will be looking at today is the Loftus and Palmer’s experiment. Elizabeth Loftus is a psychologist that mainly studied memory. She was interested not only in the different types of memory, but the distortion of it as well. She argued that memory can be easily distorted, and this often leads to misleading information. Loftus and Palmer conducted two experiments on this.
In the first experiment, they wanted to test the way that a question is worded and how this can be used to alter memory. She gathered 45 participants and put them into different groups. Each group watched 7 films of car accidents, all in random order. When they were done, each group was asked to describe what they saw in the video. This was followed up with questions by the experimenter. Each person was asked about how fast the car was going when it got hit. This same question was worded differently every time. Words like hit, contacted, collided, and smashed were used when describing the accident. As a result of this, when participants were asked how fast the car was going when it “smashed” or “collided” into each other, the speed was much higher than if they “contacted” each other.
For experiment two, Loftus and Palmer gathered 150 student participants. They all watched an one minute video of a car that was driving down a road in the countryside. Following this video, they were shown four seconds of a very bad accident. They were then asked to describe what they saw in the accident without rewatching the video. The first 50 students were asked how fast the car was going when the they hit each other, the next 50 were asked how fast it was going when they smashed each other, and the last 50 people were not asked a question at all. They were then asked if they saw shattered glass in the video. The results showed that people that were asked the question with the word “smashed” were more likely to say they saw glass.
Although this was not one of my favorite studies, I think what she was studying was very interesting. Things like eyewitness testimony is solely based on memory. Things like wrongful convictions are mostly based on eyewitnesses who think they remember something but their memory is altered. Loftus and Palmer’s experiment proves that memory can easily be manipulated and can easily alter our perception and thought.
This is fascinating! One study that’s related looks into people’s memory of 9/11. They gathered subjects right after the event and asked them to recall the details such as where they were and what they felt. Then, a year later, they were asked to recall the details. Though people were incredibly confident that they were correctly remembering the details, I think it’s like 30% of them were incorrect. Then they were asked another year later, and the memory was even worse, despite people still claiming they were very confident in their memory. If you’re really interested in this topic, you should watch Explained: The Mind by Vox on Netflix. They have one on memory and I thought it was fascinating.
This has some pretty serious philosophical implications when it comes to testimony and the like. It could be incredibly easy for a well-trained, manipulative lawyer to entirely flip a case on its head (and I’m sure it already happens), which could utterly destroy the lives of innocent people. I always thought there could be a small trend toward language having an effect, but this speaks volumes to me about its importance.