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CHAPTER
1
Memory Distortions: Problems Solved and Unsolved
Elizabeth F. Loftus
It never stops feeling strange when I read about myself. I sometimes feel like Iâm Beth, reading about some woman I donât know who happens to be named âElizabeth F. Loftus.â It happened again recently when I picked up a book by science writer Morton Hunt titled The New Know-Nothings (Hunt, 1999). There she was, that woman, leading off Chapter 9:
Elizabeth Loftus never supposed, when she tried a little experiment on her students in an undergraduate psychology course many years ago, that it would profoundly change her life, steering her onto a track that would lead her to fame ⌠and on which she would find herself deluged by hate mail, vilified by fellow professionals, and defamed in the media and on the Internet. (p. 263)
Hunt rightly noted that I was one of a number of contemporary experimental psychologists who uses the scientific method to demonstrate that human memory is malleable. He mentioned the professional success and comfortable lifestyle that accompanied these accomplishments. And he commented repeatedly on the downside. âLoftus has made a host of angry, vindictive, and often aggressive enemies who have tried to discredit her findings, besmirch her reputation, and harass her in an effort to force her to abandon her research âŚâ (p. 264).
These kinds of things didnât seem to happen to William James, who had intuitions about false memories a century ago. âFalse memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us,â he said in Principles of Psychology (James, 1890, pp. 373â374). âThe most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost always make both more simple and more interesting than the truthâ (pp. 373â374). James had intuited a basic truth about memory, but it was a truth that not everyone wanted to hear.
A LIFE IN MEMORY
For more than three decades, Iâve been soaked in the study of human memory. Growing up, I never for a moment thought I would be a scientist studying the fickle creature of memory. Mostly I thought I would stay at home raising a family, just as my mother had done when she gave up working as a librarian after marrying my father, a workaholic physician. Before settling on psychology, I considered the possibility of becoming a mathematics teacher and briefly flirted with the idea of being a private detective or a stockbroker. I was almost through graduate school before 1 had an inkling that memory would be the field for me. It was even later that the specific problem of the malleability of memory would take center stage.
FINDING A PROBLEM TO SOLVE
I first delved into the malleability of memory back in the early 1970s, at least a couple of years after receiving my PhD. Until then I had done research in graduate school on a totally different topic (computer-assisted instruction) and completed a doctoral thesis titled âAn Analysis of the Structural Variables That Determine Problem-Solving Difficulty on a Computer-Based Teletype.â It was about how adolescents solve mathematical word problems, which problems are more difficult to solve, and why (Loftus, 1970). I managed to publish the work with my thesis adviser (Loftus & Suppes, 1972), but computer-assisted instruction never captivated me the way memory distortion would.
While working on my thesis, I began another project on semantic memory. I studied how people reach into their long-term memory storage and produce appropriate answers to questions. When asked, âWhat is the name of an animal that begins with the letter Z?â people are extraordinarily fast to find a correct answer, âzebra.â When asked for a âfruit that is yellowâ they have no problem coming up with âbananaâ in 2 seconds or so. How do they do it? With thousands and thousands of facts stored in memory, how do they find just the one so quickly? Analyses of the response times to these simple questions revealed a great deal about how human beings organize information into concepts or categories within long-term memory (Collins & Loftus, 1975; Loftus & Freedman, 1972). I was captivated by this problem for a few years.
But studying accurate and fast memory retrieval would give way to a budding, then blossoming, interest in erroneous memory retrieval. It happened serendipitously. I had lunch with my lawyer-cousin Laurie who said, âSo, youâre an experimental psychologist. Have you made any discoveries?â âYes. âI proudly said. âI, and my former professor, discovered that people are faster to give you the name of a âfruit that is yellowâ than they are to give you a âyellow fruitââfaster by about a quarter of a second.â Laurie seemed less than impressed. Her response was sarcastic, something along the lines of, âSo how much did we pay for that result?ââa reference to government funding of scientific research.
It was that conversation that got me started thinking that I would really like to study something that had more obvious social relevance. I had always had an interest in legal issues and cases and, with a background in the area of memory, the idea to study the memory of witnesses to legally important events such as crimes and accidents seemed to be a natural fit. As luck would have it, one of my former professors from Stanford had gone to work in Washington, DC, for the U.S. Department of Transportation. âThereâs money in accidents,â he told me. And so I wrote a grant proposal to secure funding for a project studying the memories of witnesses to accidents. Whereas other researchers were studying memory for words or numbers or nonsense syllables or other simple objects, I borrowed 16-mm films from the local traffic safety council and police departments and studied subjectsâ recollections of filmed traffic accidents. I showed the film, then quizzed the subjects on what they saw, but I altered the wording of the questions slightly from subject to subject. I found that by wording the questions differently, I could transform the subjectsâ memories of what they saw. For example, when I asked how fast the cars were going when they âsmashed intoâ each other, the subjects consistently remembered higher speeds than when I used the word hit. These studies showed that the words you use in a question could affect the answer someone gives you. Moreover, just changing a single word or two in a question can sometimes have a sizable effect on the answer, changing the recollection from one in which a driver behaved legally to one in which the driver exceeded the speed limit.
One day, I stumbled onto a greater effect. The wording of a question could not just have an immediate effect on a witnessâs memoryâit could have long-range effects. The wording of an initial question could affect the answers to questions that were posed later, often much later. Consider what happened to subjects who were asked the âsmashedâ or âhitâ question about the speed of the vehicles in a simulated accident. A week later they were asked whether they saw âbroken glass.â Those who had been asked the âsmashedâ question were far more likely to claim theyâd seen broken glass, even though none existed (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). This was my earliest indication that the initial leading questions were contaminating memory in a profound way.
I began to see the leading questions that altered my subjectsâ answers as just one means by which this could happen. Leading questions were a vehicle for communicating information to witnesses, but they were only one vehicle. It could be done by feeding a witness the version of the event as told by another witness, or by exposing witnesses to mistaken news coverage about a previously seen event. In all of these ways, the potential to contaminate a witnessâs recollection was there.
PROBLEMS SOLVED
Over the next 20 years, this research area flourished as many innovative researchers joined the collective scientific adventure. Thanks to their efforts (and some of mine), the world now has a sizeable body of published research showing that new, postevent information often becomes incorporated into memory, supplementing and altering a personâs recollection. New âinformationâ invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence. This body of research showing how memory can become skewed when people assimilate new data typically utilizes a simple three-part procedure. Subjects first witness a complex event, such as a simulated crime or accident. Subsequently, half receive new and misleading information about the event. The other half get no misinformation. Finally, all attempt to recall the original event. In virtually every study done using this paradigm, those who had not received the phony misinformation had more accurate memories. Large memory distortions have now been found in hundreds of studies, involving a wide variety of materials. People have recalled nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders, a clean-shaven man as having a mustache, straight hair as curly, and even something as large and conspicuous as a barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all. In short, misleading postevent information can alter a personâs recollection in a powerful, even predictable manner. The phenomenon became known as the âmisinformation effectâ (Loftus & Hoffman. 1989).
MEMORY PROBLEMS IN THE REAL WORLD
After having spent a few years doing these laboratory studies, I had a craving to see how they related to real witnesses of real events. I had recently moved to the University of Washington, and one of the few people I knew in the area before moving was the chief trial attorney at the local public defenderâs office, Phil Ginsberg. He was working at the time on a case of a woman, Iâll call her Sally, who shot her boyfriend after a violent argument. She had indeed shot the boyfriend, but she said it was self-defense. In exchange for allowing me to watch the various phases of the case involving the witness testimony, I volunteered to educate Phil about the findings of psychological science that might be relevant or helpful to his case. Sally was ultimately acquitted of murder. I thought Sallyâs story, and the role of psychology, might make an interesting article, so I wrote one for Psychology Today magazine, which titled the article âReconstructing Memory: The Incredible Eyewitness.â I wasnât too crazy about the artwork because it reminded me of Ripleyâs Believe It or Not, but the content of my article was fine. I managed to incorporate a number of my recently published studies, such as the âsmashedâ versus âhitâ results, showing the malleability of memory. The circulation of the magazine was quite large (over a million at the time) and, before writing the article, I was unaware that so many judges and lawyers read the magazine, but would soon learn that they did. After âThe Incredible Eyewitnessâ was published (Loftus, 1974), lawyers began calling to see if I would help them on their upcoming cases. Other lawyers, and then judges, called to see if I would give continuing-education lectures about eyewitness testimony and its implications for the legal system. I began lecturing every summer at the National Judicial Collegeâa program for state-level judges at the University of Nevada.
And thus began a new phase of my professional lifeâconsulting for the legal profession. 1 became involved in the court cases and the cases became material for my classes; students loved the true-crime connections. Research ideas came whenever a case posed a question that I could not answer. Studies and their publication led to more interest in the psychological aspects of eyewitness testimony. I met some notorious people in the processâTed Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Nightstalker. I also met people about whom I was so convinced of their innocence that it kept me up at night. Steve Titus, accused of rape; Tim Hennis, accused of murder; Clarence Von Williams, accused of rape; Howard Haupt, accused of murder. I told some of these stories in a book called Witness for the Defense, coauthored with Katherine Ketcham, who was, for a time, working as a secretary for me. Now she is a very successful nonfiction writer (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991).
BIGGER MEMORY PROBLEMS
I spent more than a decade trying to unravel the misinformation effect. I had so many questions: Are we all equally susceptible to the misinformation effect or are some of us more susceptible than others? What are the conditions under which people are especially susceptible? When people give a misinformation response and claim it as a memory, do they really believe it is true? And, the trickiest of all, once the misinformation is injected and accepted, what happens to the original memory? Hundreds of experiments involving tens of thousands of human participants helped to provide some answers.
But at some point, to tell the truth, I started getting a little bored with the misinformation effect. Gathering with friends one New Yearâs Eve, we wrote our resolutions on little slips of paper and put them into a box to be opened the following year. Mine said something like âI want to carve out maybe a third of my time and do something totally different.â A year later, when I opened that little slip of paper and read the previous yearâs resolution 1 thought, âHow sad, I didnât do it.â I took the piece of paper, added the phrase âThis time I really mean it,â and put it back in the box to be opened the following year. And the âsomething differentâ serendipitously came to me. My research would take a new turn in the early 1990s and that turn was prompted by an unusual court case that fell into my lap.
I got a call from Doug Horngrad, an attorney in San Francisco, who had a most unusual case. Doug had been a public defender and so had had lots of trial experience. He was now in private practice, where he acquired even more experience, including murder cases. But heâd never had a case quite like the one he was handling. The case involved a man named George Franklin, who was accused of murdering 8-year-old Susie Nason back in 1969. Franklin was accused of raping and murdering Susie 20 years earlier based on the testimony of Franklinâs daughter Eileen, who claimed she witnessed the crimes in 1969 and repressed her memory for two decades. I began to search for evidence that the mind could repress years of horrible brutalization because Eileen had also claimed years of sexual abuse committed upon her by her father that was also repressed. I was shocked to find that there was no credible scientific support for this hand-me-down Freudian notion. Despite the lack of support, the jury bought into Eileenâs story (bolstered by mental health professionals), and they convicted George Franklin of murder. They were so persuaded that they found him guilty after only a day of deliberations. And Franklin became virtually the first American citizen to be convicted of murder based on nothing other than an allegedly repressed and de-repressed memory (see Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, chap. 6, for a detailed description of the Franklin case).
After the conviction. Eileen Franklin went on television talk shows. She published a popular book about her horrible father. Her story was aired in a made-for-TV movie. Occasionally I was asked to appear on the talk shows to tell âthe other side.â On one such occasion, I was invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss Eileenâs case. I flew to Chicago the day before my birthday, and at 10 p.m. that night I received a call from the producers saying that Eileen and her supporting psychiatrist were refusing to appear if I were allowed on the stage with them. I was given two optionsâsit in the audience and be able to speak for a minute or two. or go back home. I decided a minute or two was better than nothing to get an important message across. (Oprah did feel bad about this, and after the show offered me the use of her limousine and lunch at a restaurant she owned. A sort of âsorryâ and sort of âbirthdayâ peace offering.)
Public appearances on Oprah and elsewhere were almost certainly responsible for my receiving hundreds of letters and phone calls from desperate parents who also found themselves accused of recently âde-repressedâ abuse.âOne week before my husband died after an 8-month battle against lung cancer,â wrote one woman from California, âour youngest daughter (age 38) confronted me with the accusation that he had molested ...
