Psychology: Elizabeth Loftus
April 1st, 2005
Elizabeth Loftus
Elizabeth Loftus suggests there should be a new, different oath that witnesses take before testifying in court.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth or whatever it is you think you remember?”
Loftus researches the reliability of eyewitness reports and memories “recovered” through therapy; her work on memory distortion has affected the way the court system and law enforcement agencies view such testimony.
The 2005 winner of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology is well-known for her study of the “malleability and fallibility of memory,” as U of L professor Fred Wightman explained in introducing Loftus’ campus talk March 30. He described her work as leading to an entire subspecialty in psychology, with impact in other fields such as criminology, law and psychiatry.
Loftus, distinguished research professor at University of California-Irvine, spoke about her close experiences with real-world problems in her talk,“What’s the Matter with Memory?”
“Even just looking at the last decade, we see problems, for example, in wrongful convictions. With the new developments in DNA technology, we now know that there are a growing number of individuals who’ve been wrongly convicted of crimes that they didn’t do and, when those cases have been analyzed, it has been discovered that faulty human memory, faulty eyewitness memory, is the major cause for wrongful conviction. These individuals who’ve been analyzed spent five, 10, 15, 20 years in prison, some of them, for these crimes that they did not do,” Loftus said.
Other people have made criminal accusations stemming from repressed memories (of sexual abuse, for example) that they say have surfaced during therapy; Loftus described some of those cases as “an interesting example of the use of memory gone awry in the context of the legal system, which is where I tend to focus a lot of my energy.”
Loftus has been an expert witness or consultant in hundreds of high-profile legal cases, including trials involving Rodney King, Michael Jackson and the Oklahoma City bombing.
The psychologist described many experiments she and colleagues have conducted to probe false recollections. The work shows that people can recall events and details about things that never occurred when information suggested to them becomes entwined with their true memory.
The experiments included the “’lost in the mall’ procedure” of leading people to believe they as children had been separated from adults during a shopping trip, cried and were returned to their families by an older person. Other experiments involving “planted memories” yielded similar results, and some people recalled false events in great detail.
The level of detail is significant because others, including judges and psychotherapists, may judge the authenticity of testimony by the degree of sensory detail, according to Loftus.
The research is not without controversy.
“People love to hate this work,” she said.
Critics might counter that people could be recalling actual scenarios. So Loftus and others developed experiments that involved “impossible memories.”
She described an experiment in which people exposed to fake ads were led to believe they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland; some, when pressed for details, could recall shaking the character’s hand or touching his ear, etc. The problem was that the famous rabbit is a Warner Bros. cartoon character, rather than a Disney figure, and so would never have been at Disneyland.
Loftus, also a fellow of the University of California’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, said that she already has given the first installment of her $200,000 Grawemeyer prize to her university toward furthering memory research.
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