Howard Burton - The Malleability of Memory: A Conversation with Elizabeth Loftus

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 dont 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 worlds 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 each other, neatly demonstrating how just changing a word or two in a question might affect how people report past experiences.

But this was, scientifically speaking, just the tip of the iceberg.

I began to see these questions as pieces of misinformation that could contaminate or distort the witness memory, and my body of work more generally began to be about how post-event suggestions might contaminate memory. We ultimately called this phenomenon the misinformation effect.

Despite her rigorously scientific disposition, Elizabeth has never been one for permanently retreating to the isolation of a laboratory. As a keen young faculty member at the University of Washington, she began reaching out to the legal world, approaching one of the chief trial attorneys in the Public Defenders Office in Seattle to ask if she might begin consulting with him in the hopes of applying some of her new-found knowledge of memorys fallibility to the real world of court rooms and indictments.

I worked with him on a case involving a woman who was accused of attempted murder where there were memory issues, and that woman ended up being acquitted.

I took all this informationthe case, the acquittal, the science that was relevant to itand I wrote an article for Psychology Today magazine. After that article appeared I got all kinds of calls from people asking me if I would work on other cases.

And so Elizabeths unique career path of intriguingly linking science with the law was launched. But in 1990, a new development occurred as she found herself testifying in the trial of George Franklin.

This was my first repressed memory case. Franklin was accused of murdering a little girl twenty years earlier, based on nothing other than the claim by his grown-up daughter that she had witnessed the murder, repressed her memory, and now the memory was back.

I thought to myself, This idea of repressionwhat is it? Whats the evidence for it? Where did it come from? I started to look into that, and thats how I got into this whole world of repression and psychotherapya world that Id never been in before. I was reading the writings of psychotherapists, the practices of psychotherapy, the supposed memory-recovery techniques of psychotherapyand that led me towards a whole new line of work.

Behold the scientific temperament. Because its not enough merely to say, I know from my own research that human memory is potentially malleable, which makes me deeply sceptical of all these psychotherapeutic techniques. That is only a starting point. A scientist must go much further.

Which is exactly what Elizabeth did. In a stunning series of results, she began concretely demonstrating that she could directly implant false memories herself into a remarkably high percentage of subjects.

Of course, this sort of research is an ethical minefield. On the one hand, Elizabeth naturally felt motivated to create a false memory that was sufficiently rich and detailed that it might be analogous to the sorts of things that were levelled at George Franklin.

On the other hand, its hardly morally appropriate to convince someone of having experienced a traumatic event, however scientifically and socially relevant such research might prove to be.

Her solution struck a solid balance between the two: interacting directly with the subjects mother to establish the appropriate background, she managed to successfully implant a specific false memory of being lost in a mall as a small child before being rescued by an elderly samaritan into a whopping 25% of her sample group.

Suffice it to say that some of the practitioners and patients of repressed memory therapy were none too pleased by these results nor the many additional studies that Elizabeth has since been involved in.

But both the scientific and legal communities have loudly made their voices heard. Elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 2004, Elizabeth has had countless additional awards and honours showered on her, including the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal, the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award, the William T. Rossiter Award and the Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and Law Award from the American Psychology-Law Society.