Planting memories: does the lost-in-the-mall result generalise from a mild fabricated event to trauma?

Elizabeth Loftus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A whole event that never happened can be installed in a substantial minority of people, they will elaborate it with detail they were never given, and they will hold it with confidence.12345

Sources

  1. American Brigadier General Elliot Thorpe recalled the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor one way in a memoir and completely differently in an oral history taken on his retirement. Both accounts, in fact, were riddled with errors (Weintraub, 1991). Evidence of a less anecdotal, more experimental nature supports the imperfections of personally experienced traumatic memories.
    The reality of repressed memories, p. 14
  2. Can One Inject a Complete Memory for Something That Never Happened? It is one thing to discover that memory for an actual traumatic event is changed over time but quite another to show that one can inject a whole event into someone's mind for something that never happened. There are numerous anecdotes and experimental studies that show it is indeed possible to lead people to construct entire events.
    The reality of repressed memories, p. 14
  3. But people are often wrong, initially reporting they first heard the news at school from a friend and later remembering that they first heard it at home while watching the television. Moreover, people believe their inaccurate memories and are surprised when they see their initial reports (Neisser & Harsch,; see Talarico & Rubin,).
    Updating Ebbinghaus on the science of memory, p. 212
  4. Those details that gave her story such apparent credibility were widely reported in the media and were thus available to anyone who read the papers, watched television, or listened to others talk about the murder.
    Elizabeth F (Loftus (Autobiography) In Lindzey, G & Runyan, M (Eds) History of Psychology in Autobiography Vol IX Washington, DC- APA p 198-227, 2007), pp. 16–17
  5. Decades of research shows that people can come to remember events that never happened. In fact, as scientists who conduct this kind of research, we know it is not all that difficult to 'implant' false memories. Many participants in our experiments remember a wide range of experiences that just were not so.
    Misrepresentations and Flawed Logic About the Prevalence of False Memories

Where the argument is made

  • The formation of false memories with Pickrell (Psychiatric Annals, 1995)
  • Make-Believe Memories (American Psychologist, 2003)
  • the imagination-inflation and food-belief studies with Garry, Bernstein and Laney

How the argument was received

The result is replicated and not seriously disputed; what it licenses about trauma is.