by DK
Legal implications
It became clear to Loftus that recollection can be distorted by suggestions and leading questions, made after the event in question. Misinformation can be “planted” into the recollection of an observer. The title of her 1979 book describing her experiments, Eyewitness Testimony, shows that Loftus was well aware of the implications of this “misinformation effect,” not only for the psychological theory of memory, but also for the legal process. Anticipating the controversy that was to follow, she wrote that “the unreliability of eyewitness identification evidence poses one of the most serious problems in the administration of criminal justice and civil litigation.”
"In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened."
Elizabeth Loftus
False memory syndrome
Loftus was soon to be increasingly involved in forensic psychology, as an expert witness in the spate of child abuse cases of the 1980s. What she realized then was that memories could not only be distorted by subsequent suggestion and incorrect details introduced by misinformation, but may even be totally false. Among the many cases in which she was involved, that of George Franklin perfectly illustrates the different aspects of what came to be known as “false memory syndrome.” Franklin was convicted in 1990 for the murder of a child who was best friends with his daughter, Eileen. Her eyewitness testimony, 20 years after the murder, was crucial to the conviction. Loftus found numerous discrepancies in Eileen’s evidence, and proved her memories to be incorrect and unreliable in several respects, but the jury nonetheless found Franklin guilty.
In 1995, the conviction was overturned because the court had been deprived of “crucial evidence:” the fact that Eileen had “recovered” the memory during hypnotherapy. Loftus believed that Eileen’s memory of seeing her father commit the murder was sincerely believed, but false, and had evolved because Eileen had witnessed her father commit other cruel actions, and “one brutal image overlapped another.” Loftus successfully argued in court that a combination of suggestion during hypnosis, existing frightening memories, and Eileen’s rage and grief had created a completely false “repressed memory.”
The case of Paul Ingram (which Loftus was not involved in) also pointed toward the possibility of implanting false memories. Arrested in 1988 for sexually abusing his daughters, Ingram initially denied the charges, but after several months of questioning confessed to them along with a number of other cases of rape and even murder. A psychologist involved in the case, Richard Ofshe, grew suspicious and suggested to Ingram he was guilty of another sexual offence—but this time, one that was provably fabricated. Ingram again initially denied the allegation, but later made a detailed confession.
Lost in the mall
The evidence for the implantation of false memories was still anecdotal, however, and far from conclusive; Loftus suffered harsh criticism for what were then considered to be controversial opinions. So she decided to collect irrefutable evidence through an experiment that aimed to deliberately implant false memories. This was her 1995 “Lost in the Mall” experiment.
Loftus presented each of the participants with four stories from their own childhood that had apparently been remembered and supplied by members of the participant’s family. In fact, only three of the four stories were true; the fourth, about getting lost in a shopping mall, was concocted for the experiment. Plausible details, such as a description of the mall, were worked out in collaboration with the relatives. Interviewed about these stories one week later and then again two weeks later, the participants were asked to rate how well they remembered the events in the four stories. At both interviews, 25% of the participants claimed to have some memory of the mall incident. After the experiment, participants were debriefed and told that one of the stories was false—did they know which it was? Of the 24 participants, 19 correctly chose the mall as the false memory; but five participants had grown to sincerely believe in a false memory of a mildly traumatic event.
"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?"
Elizabeth Loftus
Loftus had provided an insight into how false memories might form in real, everyday settings. For ethical reasons Loftus could not devise an experiment to test whether a truly traumatic false memory (such as child abuse) would be even more vividly recalled and sincerely believed, but she suggested that it would, in the same way that a more disturbing dream is more vividly recalled and even mistaken for reality. It was this idea that prompted her to say, “what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.”
However, in 1986, psychologists John Yuille and Judith Cutshall did manage to conduct a study of memory following a traumatic situation. They found that witnesses to an actual incident of gun shooting had remarkably accurate memories, even six months after the event, and resisted attempts by the researchers to distort their memories though misleading questions.
Questionable therapy
Loftus points out that her findings do not deny that crimes such as abuse may have taken place, nor can she prove that repressed memories do not exist; she merely stresses the unreliability of recovered memory, and insists that courts must seek evidence beyond this. Her work has also called into question the validity of the various methods used to recover memory, including psychotherapeutic techniques such as regression, dream work, and hypnosis. Consequently, it raised the possibility that false memories can be implanted during the therapeutic process by suggestion, and in the 1990s several US patients who claimed they were victims of “false memory syndrome” successfully sued their therapists. Unsurprisingly, this apparent attack on the very idea of repressed memory earned an adverse reaction from some psychotherapists, and split opinion among psychologists working in the field of memory. Reaction from the legal world was also divided, but after the hysteria surrounding a series of child abuse scandals in the 1990s had died down, guidelines incorporating Loftus’s theories on the reliability of eyewitness testimony were adopted by many legal systems.
Today, Loftus is acknowledged as an authority on the subject of false memory. Her theories have become accepted by mainstream psychology and have inspired further research into the fallibility of memory in general, notably by Daniel Schacter in his book, The Seven Sins of Memory.
Despite the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, Loftus found that jurors tend to give more weight to it than any other form of evidence when reaching a verdict.
ELIZABETH LOFTUS
Born Elizabeth Fishman in Los Angeles in 1944, Loftus received her first degree at the University of California with the intention of becoming a high school math teacher. While at UCLA, however, she started classes in psychology, and in 1970 received a PhD in psychology at Stanford University. It was here that she first became interested in the subject of long-term memory, and met and married fellow psychology student Geoffrey Loftus, whom she later divorced. She taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, for 29 years, becoming professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law. She was appointed distinguished professor at the University of California in 2002, and was the highest-ranked woman in a scientifically quantified ranking of the 20th century’s most important psychologists.
Key works
1979 Eyewitness Testimony
1991 Witness for the Defense (with Katherine Ketcham)
1994 The Myth of Repressed Memory (with Katherine Ketcham)
See also: Sigmund Freud • Bluma Zeigarnik • George Armitage Miller • Endel Tulving • Gordon H. Bow
er • Daniel Schacter • Roger Brown • Frederic Bartlett
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Memory studies
BEFORE
1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus describes the “forgetting curve” in Memory.
1932 Frederic Bartlett lists seven ways in which a story may be misremembered in his book Remembering.
1956 George Armitage Miller publishes his paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.
1972 Endel Tulving makes the distinction between semantic and episodic memory.
AFTER
1995 Elizabeth Loftus studies retroactive memory in The Formation of False Memories.
2005 US psychologist Susan Clancy studies apparent memories of alien abduction.
Forgetting, Daniel Schacter believes, is an essential function of human memory, allowing it to work efficiently. Some of the experiences we go through and the information we learn may need to be remembered, but much is irrelevant and would take up valuable “storage space” in our memory, so is “deleted,” to use an analogy with computers that is often made in cognitive psychology.
"We don’t want a memory that is going to store every bit of every experience. We would be overwhelmed with clutter of useless trivia."
Daniel Schacter
Sometimes, however, the process of selection fails. What should have been tagged as useful information and stored for future use is removed from memory and therefore forgotten; or—conversely—trivial or unwanted information that should have been removed is kept in our memory.
Storage is not the only area of memory functioning with potential problems. The process of retrieval can cause confusion of information, giving us distorted recollections. Schacter lists seven ways in which memory can let us down: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. In a reference to the Seven Deadly Sins, and with a nod to George Armitage Miller’s “magical number seven,” he calls these the “seven sins of memory.” The first three Schacter calls “sins of omission,” or forgetting, and the last four are “sins of commission,” or remembering. Each sin can lead to a particular type of error in recollecting information.
The first of the sins, transience, involves the deterioration of memory, especially of episodic memory (the memory of events), over time. This is due to two factors: we can recall more of a recent event than one in the distant past; and each time we remember the event (retrieve the memory), it is reprocessed in the brain, altering it slightly.
Absent-mindedness, the sin that manifests itself in mislaid keys and missed appointments, is not so much an error of recollection but of selection for storage. Sometimes we do not pay enough attention at the time we do things (such as when we put down keys), so the information is treated by the brain as trivial and not stored for later use. In contrast to this is the sin of blocking, where a stored memory cannot be retrieved, often because another memory is getting in its way. An example of this is the “tip-of-the-tongue” syndrome, where we can nearly—but not quite—grasp a word from memory that we know very well.
Sins of commission
The “sins of commission” are slightly more complex, but no less common. In misattribution, the information is recalled correctly, but the source of that information is wrongly recalled. It is similar in its effect to suggestibility, where recollections are influenced by the way in which they are recalled, for example, in response to a leading question. The sin of bias also involves the distortion of recollection: this is when a person’s opinions and feelings at the time of recalling an event color its remembrance.
Finally, the sin of persistence is an example of the memory working too well. This is when disturbing or upsetting information that has been stored in memory becomes intrusively and persistently recalled, from minor embarrassments to extremely distressing memories.
However, the sins aren’t flaws, Schacter insists, but the costs we pay for a complex system that works exceptionally well most of the time.
DANIEL SCHACTER
Daniel Schacter was born in New York in 1952. A high-school course sparked his interest in psychology, which he went on to study at the University of North Carolina. After graduation, he worked for two years in the perception and memory laboratory of Durham Veterans Hospital, observing and testing patients with organic memory disorders. He then began postgraduate studies at Toronto University, Canada, under the supervision of Endel Tulving, whose work on episodic versus semantic memory was causing lively debate at the time. In 1981, he established a unit for memory disorders at Toronto, with Tulving and Morris Moscovitch. Ten years later, he became Professor of Psychology at Harvard, where he set up the Schacter Memory Laboratory.
Key works
1982 Stranger Behind the Engram
1996 Searching for Memory
2001 The Seven Sins of Memory
See also: Hermann Ebbinghaus • Bluma Zeigarnik • George Armitage Miller • Endel Tulving • Gordon H. Bower • Elizabeth Loftus • Frederic Bartlett
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Mindfulness meditation
BEFORE
c.500 BCE Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) includes right mindfulness as the seventh step of the Eightfold Path to end suffering.
1960s Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh popularizes mindful meditation in the US.
AFTER
1990s Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is developed by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale for the treatment of depression, and is based on Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR.
1993 Dialectical Behavior Therapy uses mindfulness without meditation for people too disturbed to achieve the necessary state of mind.
Following World War II, there was an increased interest in Eastern philosophies throughout Europe and the US, bringing ideas such as meditation into mainstream culture. The medical benefits of meditation attracted the interest of American biologist and psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, who went on to pioneer an approach known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which integrates meditation into the framework of cognitive therapy.
Buddhist meditation has encouraged the practice of mindfulness for more than 2,000 years, but its mental and physical health benefits were not clinically tested and proven until the early 1990s.
Practicing mindfulness
Central to Kabat-Zinn’s approach is “mindfulness.” In this form of meditation, the object is to observe thoughts and mental processes (as well as body or physical processes) in a detached, decentered and non-judgemental way; “to stay in the body, and to watch what’s going on in the mind, learning neither to reject things nor to pursue things, but just to let them be and let them go.”
In mindfulness meditation, we learn to observe thought processes calmly, without identifying with them, and realize that our minds have a life of their own. A thought of failure, for instance, is seen as simply an event in the mind, not as a springboard to the conclusion “I am a failure.” With practice we can learn to see mind and body as one thing: a “wholeness.” Each of us is more than just a body, says Kabat-Zinn, and more than the thoughts that go through our minds.
See also: Joseph Wolpe • Fritz Perls • Erich Fromm • Aaron Beck • Neal Miller • John D. Teasdale
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Evolutionary psychology
BEFORE
1859 Biologist Charles Darwin says that emotion, perception, and cognition are evolutionary adaptations.
1960s Noam Chomsky claims that the capacity for language is an innate ability.
1969 John Bowlby argues that the attachment of newborn babies to their mothers is genetically progr
ammed.
1976 In The Selfish Gene, British biologist Richard Dawkins states that behavioral tendencies evolve through interaction with others over a long period of time.
AFTER
2000 In The Mating Mind, American evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller says that human intelligence is shaped by sexual selection.
The debate over how much of our behavior is innate (inborn) and how much can be attributed to our environment dates back thousands of years. Some cognitive psychologists have claimed that not only do we inherit certain psychological characteristics, they are also subject to the same sort of natural selection as our physical characteristics. They point out that the mind is a product of the brain, and the brain is shaped by genetics.
This new field of evolutionary psychology has met with strong opposition, but one of its champions is the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker, who has identified four fears that lie behind our reluctance to accept evolutionary psychology despite the empirical evidence. The first fear is one of inequality: if the mind is a “blank slate” when we are born, we are all born equal. But if we inherit mental traits, some people have a natural advantage. The second fear is that if certain imperfections are innate, they are not susceptible to change, so social reform to help the disadvantaged is futile. The third fear is that if our behavior is determined by genes, we can abdicate responsibility for our misdemeanors, and blame them on our genetic make-up. The final fear, Pinker says, is the most fundamental. This is the fear that if we accept that we are shaped by evolutionary psychology, our “finer feelings”—our perceptions, motives, and emotions—will be reduced to mere processes of our genetic evolution, and so biology will “debunk all that we hold sacred.”