Elizabeth Loftus

8 Key excerpts on "Elizabeth Loftus"

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  eBook - ePub

  Shaping Psychology

  Perspectives on Legacy, Controversy and the Future of the Field

  • Tomasz Witkowski(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  © The Author(s) 2020 T. Witkowski Shaping Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50003-0_2

  Begin Abstract

  2. Elizabeth F. Loftus: Cognitive Psychology, Witness Testimony and Human Memory

  Tomasz Witkowski

  1   

  (1) Wroclaw, Poland

   

    Tomasz Witkowski

  Email: [email protected]

  Zealous conviction is a dangerous substitute for an open mind. End Abstract

  Filmmakers rarely make blockbusters out of the lives of scholars. That said, the first director who decides to make a film about the life and times of Elizabeth Loftus won’t have to do very much to keep viewers’ attention and build the suspense. Her biography is a ready-made script, full of dramatic plot twists, a riveting struggle of good against evil, honor against dishonor, and truth against lies. I am convinced that sooner or later we will see the history of this exceptional life on the big screen. I arrived at this belief in the course of reading pages and pages of biographical material, interviews and recollections prior to my conversation with Loftus . But the events that make her life’s history an attractive film subject are, to the person who experienced them, obstacles that absorb a tremendous amount of energy to overcome. Only a very few can successfully manage them, and fewer still rise above them while remaining faithful to ideals. Among these few, we may invariably find Elizabeth Loftus .

  Beth Fishman, the girl who would become Elizabeth Loftus , early on in her childhood was put to the test in a way that would break many. When she was 6, a babysitter molested her. When Beth was 14, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. The obituary called it an accident, but Beth’s father suspected suicide

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  Conversations About Law

  • Howard Burton(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Ideas Roadshow

    (Publisher)

  The Malleability of Memory A conversation with Elizabeth Loftus Passage contains an image

  Introduction

  The Benefit of the Doubt

  Imagine that one day next week, you suddenly find yourself accused of a terrible crime in the distant past that you are entirely innocent of. Your family is bewildered, your friends are anxious, and your colleagues steadily start taking distance from you. You begin by trying to put a brave face on things, certain that these horribly inexplicable accusations will soon be lifted and your life will somehow return to normal.

  But they are not. Instead, matters only get worse. The case goes to court, where you are consistently portrayed as a despicable monster who has systematically lived out a double life of abuse and intimidation on the weak and the vulnerable.

  After several months of sustained public humiliation, your mental state is now so precarious that you simply don’t know what to believe. When the verdict finally does come down, and you are found guilty, it almost feels like a relief to have a sense of “closure” of this nightmare. Swiftly, mercilessly and with no apparent reason whatsoever, your life is now irrevocably ruined.

  This deeply disturbing Kafkaesque plot is not, sadly, a film noir thriller but an actual scenario that has been played out, time and time again, in real courtrooms and with real people, whose only misfortune has been to be close to someone undergoing “repressed memory therapy.”

  Elizabeth Loftus has witnessed this sort of thing many times. One of the world’s foremost memory experts, she has devoted the majority of her research life towards demonstrating the often highly tenuous and malleable nature of human memory.

  She began her memory work in relatively mundane circumstances, studying the role of witness memory in traffic accidents. It turns out that asking witnesses how fast cars were going before they smashed into each other, for example, will consistently yield higher estimates than asking how fast they were going before they merely hit

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  Visualizing Psychology

  • Karen R. Huffman, Alastair Younger, Claire Vanston(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  (right), and Thomas Sophonow (not pictured) have in common? They were all wrongfully convicted of sexual assault, murder, or both in Cana- dian courts, and in each case eyewitness testimony contributed to their convictions. These men spent years in prison before their convictions were eventually overturned once DNA testing or newer, more reliable evidence became available. Recall that witnessing or being the victim of a violent crime is an extremely emotional event, and emotional events tend to make stronger flashbulb memories, and not weaker ones. What memory distortions do you think might have contributed to the witnesses’ errors in these cases? Rick Eglinton/GetStock.com their lights flashing, and the stretcher with the clean, white blan- ket tucked in around the edges of the body. The memory had been there all along, but I just couldn’t reach it. (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, p. 45) This is the true story of Elizabeth Loftus, who today is a well-known psychologist and influential memory re- searcher (her studies have been mentioned a number of times in this chapter). Elizabeth’s recovery of these grue- some childhood memories, although painful, initially brought great relief. It also seemed to explain why she had always been so fascinated by the topic of memory. Then, years later her brother called to say there had been a mistake! The relative who told Elizabeth that she had been the one to discover her mother’s body later re- membered—and other relatives confirmed—that it had actually been Aunt Pearl and not Elizabeth Loftus. Lof- tus, a world-renowned expert on memory distortions, had Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Ric Francis/AP Photo Memory Distortions 205 ate a false memory. The client might start to incorporate portrayals of abuse from movies and books into their own memory, forgetting their original sources and eventually coming to see them as true, reliable, and real.

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  Real World Psychology

  • Catherine A. Sanderson, Karen R. Huffman(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  WATSON Like eyewitness testimony, false memories can have serious legal, personal, and social implications. Have you heard the true life story of the famous memory expert and psychologist Elizabeth Loftus? When she was 14, her mother drowned in the family’s pool. Decades later, a relative told Elizabeth that she, Elizabeth, had been the one to find her mother’s body. Despite her initial shock, Elizabeth’s memories slowly started coming back. Her recovery of these grue- some childhood memories, although painful, initially brought great relief. It seemed to explain why she had always been fascinated by the topic of memory. The relative who told Elizabeth that she had been the one to discover her mother’s body later remembered—and other relatives confirmed—that it had actually been Aunt Pearl, not Cerebral cortex Primary visual cortex Amygdala Hippocampus Thalamus Eyewitnesses and police lineups As humorously depicted in this cartoon, officials now recommend that suspects should never “stand out” from the others in a lineup. Witnesses also are cautioned to not assume that the real criminal is in the lineup, and they should never “guess” when asked to make an identification. FIGURE 7.19 Understanding and improving eyewitness testimony Recalling Information During eyewitness recall and courtroom testimony, memories are retrieved from neurons in the cerebral cortex. How is eyewitness memory formed and retrieved? The hippocampus plays a major role in the formation and consolida- tion of new memories, as well as in the retrieval of old memo- ries about an observed event. © The New Yorker Collection 2006 Tom Cheney from Cartoonbank.com C o u r t e s y E l i z a b e t h G o u l d C o u r t e s y J e ff L i c h t m a n a n d J e a n L i v e t Masterfile 198 CHAPTER 7 Memory Elizabeth. Loftus, a world-renowned expert on memory distortions, had unknowingly created her own false memory.

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  Psychology in Action

  • Karen R. Huffman, Katherine Dowdell, Catherine A. Sanderson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Due to her talkative, outgoing nature, her colleagues at Stanford voted her the “least likely to succeed as a psychologist” (Zagorski, 2005). Ironically, Loftus is now a distinguished professor of psychology who has earned numer- ous awards and is recognized around the world for her groundbreaking research on the nature of memory. In 2002, she was the highest-ranked woman in a list of the 100 most influential psy- chological researchers of the 20th century, and in 2016 she was awarded the John Maddox Prize for promoting sound science on a matter of public interest (Sample, 2016). Chapter Overview How could a psychologist famous for her research on memory forget finding her mother’s body? In this chapter, you’ll discover more details about Loftus’s “recovered memory” regarding her mother’s body, along with the story’s shocking ending. You’ll also learn many other fascinating facts about memory. We begin the chapter with a look at the nature of memory. Next, we explore the basic theories and factors in forgetting and the biological bases of memory. Then we examine when, how, and why we sometimes distort our memories. The chapter closes with a summary of the best memory-improvement tools for your academic success. The Nature of Memory 221 One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. —Antonio Porchia (Argentinian Poet, Author, Philosopher) In Chapter 6, we discussed how the ability to learn is essential to our very survival because it allows us to learn and adapt to our ever-changing environment. But we cannot learn unless we can remember our past, weave it into our present, and then use our vast storehouse of 7.1 The Nature of Memory LEARNING OBJECTIVES Retrieval Practice While reading the upcoming sections, respond to each Learning Objective in your own words. Summarize the key factors, research findings, and major models of memory. • Define memory and its constructive process. • Discuss the four major memory models.

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  Reflections from Pioneering Women in Psychology

  • Jamila Bookwala, Nicky J. Newton(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Skeptical Inquirer, (), –, . Loftus, E. F., & Hoffman, H. G. (). Misinformation and memory: The creation of memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, (), –. Loftus, E. F., & Ketcham, K. (). Witness for the defense: The accused, the eyewitness, and the expert who puts memory on trial. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. (). The myth of repressed memory. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the inter-action between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, (), –. Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, (), –. Suppes, P., Loftus, E. F., & Jerman, M. (). Problem-solving on a computer- based teletype. Educational Studies in Mathematics, , –. Scoboria, A., Wade, K. A., Lindsay, D. S., Azad, T., Strange, D., Ost, J., & Hyman, I. (). A mega-analysis of memory reports from eight peer- reviewed false memory implantation studies. Memory, (), –. Tricked by Memory  Jeanne Marecek is William Kenan Professor Emerita of Psychology at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA. At Swarthmore, she served as Chair of the Department of Psychology and Coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program. She held positions as Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka, Visiting Professor in Psychology at the University of Oslo, and Guest Professor in the Graduate School of Gender Studies at Umeå University in Sweden. She was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and at the Center for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Dr. Marecek has taught courses in abnormal psychology, psychology and women, cultural psychology, and qualitative research methods.

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  OCR Psychology

  AS Core Studies and Psychological Investigations

  • Philip Banyard, Cara Flanagan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Read the original article by Loftus and Palmer. See if you can find it online, or obtain a copy from your local library (they will order a copy if you provide a full reference).

  Read other accounts of the research:

  Two classic books by Elizabeth Loftus

  Eyewitness Testimony

  (new edition 1996, Harvard University Press) and The Myth of Repressed Memory (1996, St. Martin’s Press), as well as Witness for the Defense written with Katherine Ketcham (St Martin’s, 1992).

  Research by Elizabeth Loftus is discussed in a chapter of Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater, a book which contains the background to a number of key studies in psychology though this has received some serious criticism (search online).

  Watch a video on YouTube about the accuracy of memory ‘False memory and eyewitness testimony’ (http://tinyurl.com/bv9pv24 ).

  Evaluating the study by Loftus and Palmer

  There are no simple answers.

  Evaluating a study requires you to think.

  We have provided some pointers here, linked to the RESEARCH METHODS and KEY ISSUES covered in Chapter 1 (Psychological investigations) and Chapter 7 (Key issues). You can read suggested answers on our website www.psypress.com/cw/banyard .

  The research method This study was a laboratory experiment.

  What are the strengths and weaknesses of this research method in the context of this study?

  The experiment used an independent measures design.

  What are the strengths and weaknesses of this experimental design in the context of this study?

  The sample American students were used in this study. In what way is this group of participants unique?

  How would the unique characteristics of the sample in this study effect the conclusions drawn?

  You might consider that America is an individualist

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  Memory

  The Key to Consciousness

  • Richard F. Thompson, Stephen A. Madigan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The basic Loftus experiment has been elabo- rated and extended in many respects. A particularly important one is that false autobiographical (personal) memories can be cre- ated under certain conditions. This goes far beyond modification of the memory of small details of an impersonal event. In one such experiment Loftus and colleagues put together a set of de- scriptions of actual childhood events for their college student re- search subjects. Most of these events were actual experiences and were provided to the experimenters by parents and siblings. Some of the events were entirely fictitious but involved plausible and personally meaningful or emotional events, such as having been lost in a shopping mall, spilling champagne at a wedding recep- tion, or being hospitalized. The subjects read the narratives, indi- cated whether they remembered the events or not, and wrote recollections of the events if they did remember them. Several important outcomes occurred in such experiments. One was that subjects could recognize a high percentage (75 per- cent or more) of the true narratives, and this probably represents recall of material after something like a 15-year-long retention interval. The second important result was that about 25 percent of the subjects in these experiments also accepted the fictitious narrative and continued to do so in follow-up testing sessions. Are there limits to the kind of false memory that can be im- FALSE MEMORY 151 planted? In some studies it has been shown that the plausibility of the false event can have a strong influence on how readily a fictitious event will be accepted as a real one.

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