In this resume, we are going to talk about a conference made by Elizabeth Loftus.
Who is Elizabeth Loftus and what does she work on?
Elizabeth Loftus is a cognitive psychologist and researcher who focused her research on memory. She developed a theory and a lot of studies about what she named “false memories” and that is what she talks about in this lecture. That means she doesn’t study what people forget but what people think to remember. A very interesting subject, especially as we all have some fake memories, but also very controversial because of what it implies.
How did Loftus discover and developed her research?
First, E. Loftus during her lecture explains the case of Steve Titus who was apparently a “normal” guy, who lived in Seattle and worked in a restaurant. He also had a girlfriend and was going to marry her, but nothing happened like it was expected. Indeed, one night, after going to the restaurant with his girlfriend, he got arrested by a police car. You may ask yourself why, right? Well, a rape of a woman occurred that same night and the man who did it had mostly the same car than Steve and looked a little bit like him. Later, policemen took a picture of Titus to show it to the victim, so she could eventually recognize her aggressor. The victim said he looked like him, but she wasn’t sure he was her rapist. What happened next is very interesting in terms of memories. In fact, when S.Titus was being judged, the victim said something different than the first time she saw the picture : “I am absolutely sure it was this man”. Steven Titus tried to claim his innocence but in vain, he went to jail.
After some years, S.Titus was completely desperate but he had an idea : he contacted a local journal and a journalist got interested about his case. She investigated to find out the truth and finally, she discovered the veritable aggressor who committed more than 50 rapes and admitted he made this one too. Of course, after that S.Titus was released from prison. .
The question here, and obviously what intrigued E. Loftus, was: why did the victim change her perspective about S.Titus and how did she go from having a doubt about this man being her aggressor to being sure about it? Well, as you may understand reading this paper, she explained it by false memories. The victim, by being interrogated and maybe because time has passed, constructed a false memory about what happened to her, and especially about the person who aggressed her.
After studying this case, E. Loftus tried to understand the process of this kind of memory. To explain it, she compares our brain to a computer and says the mechanisms are not the same because as humans, we register information that can be recuperated but when we do the action to remember things can be modified, it’s a memory but it’s not the reality. Then, our brain would be more like Wikipedia to her, information is registered but we can change it and someone else can do it too. Indeed, E. Loftus found out among 300 people who were accused to have committed crimes, 200 actually admitted them even if they didn’t really do it (proved later by DNI tests). It was explained by the defaults of the memory by the witnesses.
Knowing this, E. Loftus tried to demonstrate this process of our brain doing experiments and wanted to show that it happens all the time, in our daily life, not only in situations where people are under stress. In one of her experiments, she showed a video of a car colliding with another and then asked the participants a question about what they saw using different words (impact or crash), in another one, she showed the participants photos of a car stopping at a stop sign and then asked them a question that may or may not include the indication that it was a yield sign. The results of these different studies concluded that the formulation of a question, that means the way we ask a question and the words we use, have an importance in how people recover their memory. This will be modified because there is an induction that is made during the interrogation.
How is Elizabeth Loftus’ work controversial?
Well, her work has challenged not only the memories of every person in his or her daily life but also those of people who have witnessed or even been victims of aggression. She questioned the word of the victims about the person who assaulted them but also about the fact that they were really assaulted. In addition, she questioned the practice of some psychologists by stating that certain tools used, such as hypnosis, induce false memories and therefore would be unethical towards the patient.
How can this research be relevant to our practice?
It is necessary to know the tools we use and the impact they can have. That’s why we cannot use hypnosis for example without having done any training. Moreover, the false memories are present in patients and it may affect their memory and then therapies. It depends on the institution we are working for, if we are working in the field of justice it will allow us to put into perspective what the person is telling us by not having a confirmation bias at first. In other areas, it tells us that it may be more necessary to stay focused on what this generates in the person and their feelings rather than the facts as such.
Words we have learn :
False memory = faux-souvenir
Rapist = violeur
Yield sign = panneau cédez-le passage
D’autant plus= especially as
To collide = entrer en collision.