Elizabeth Loftus

1944-present · American · Cognitive Psychology

When you change memory, it changes you.

Elizabeth Loftus (b. 1944) is an American cognitive psychologist who established that human memory is reconstructive — that what a person remembers can be altered by what they are told afterwards — and then spent decades carrying that finding into courtrooms, where it made her both indispensable and detested.

Topics Elizabeth Loftus addresses

• the misinformation effect
• the malleability of memory
• reconstructive memory
• post-event information
• leading questions and the eyewitness report
• the lost-in-the-mall study
• rich false memories
• imagination inflation
• the plausibility of a suggested event
• false beliefs with behavioural consequences
• recovered memory therapy
• the repressed memory controversy
• the memory wars
• dissociative amnesia as a substitute term
• the scientist-practitioner gap
• eyewitness identification
• weapon focus
• unconscious transference
• confidence and accuracy in identification
• juror understanding of eyewitness evidence
• expert testimony on memory
• the permanence of stored information
• spreading activation in semantic memory
• memory distortion under stress

Questions to put to Elizabeth Loftus

The Misinformation Effect and Reconstructive Memory

• What do you mean when you say memory is a reconstruction rather than a recording?
• How did the car crash experiments show that a single word could change what people remember?
• Can post-event information actually overwrite the original memory, or does it just make it harder to access?
• Why do people incorporate details they learned after an event into their memory of the event itself?
• What's the difference between a memory being distorted and a memory being completely fabricated?

Planting False Memories

• How were you able to convince people they had been lost in a mall as children when it never happened?
• What makes a suggested event plausible enough that someone will come to remember it?
• Do people just go along with the suggestion, or do they actually believe the false memory is real?
• Can false beliefs about the past change how people behave in the present?
• How elaborate can a planted memory become once the seed is planted?

The Recovered Memory Controversy

• What's your argument against the idea that traumatic memories can be completely repressed and then recovered years later?
• How do the techniques used in recovered memory therapy compare to the techniques that produce false memories in your lab?
• Why isn't the emotional intensity or confidence of a recovered memory good evidence that it's real?
• How do you respond to the criticism that your work on false memories shields real abusers from accountability?
• What's at stake for you in distinguishing between the reality of abuse and the reliability of a particular memory?

Eyewitness Identification and the Law

• Why do confident eyewitnesses so often turn out to be wrong?
• What is weapon focus, and how does it affect what a witness remembers?
• How can a witness unconsciously transfer a face they saw in one context into their memory of a crime?
• What do jurors wrongly assume about how memory works in eyewitness testimony?
• Should courts allow expert testimony to explain to jurors how unreliable eyewitness memory can be?

Memory Research and Real Cases

• What led you to investigate the Jane Doe case that had been published as evidence for recovered memory?
• How do you think about the ethics of checking whether a published case study is what it appears to be?
• Why have you testified for defendants in cases where doing so was unpopular?
• What's the scientist-practitioner gap, and why does it matter for how memory is treated in therapy and in court?

Converse with Elizabeth Loftus on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Elizabeth Loftus's own writing, cited to the page.