Elizabeth Loftus studies how memories become distorted.
Highlights:
- When we remember an experience, we piece together fragments that can be altered by information we encounter later.
- In “lost in the mall” experiments, around 30% of participants developed some degree of memory for an event that never happened.
- Loftus’s experiments showed that the way a question is phrased can influence people’s estimates of events and even lead them to “remember” details that were never there.
- In courtrooms, eyewitness and victim testimony can carry enormous weight, yet confidence in a memory does not necessarily mean that it is accurate.
- A memory can contain errors without being entirely false, and a confident memory can still contain inaccurate details. Understanding these limitations is essential when memories can affect another person’s life.
One Saturday morning, a six-year-old girl finds herself in a huge shopping mall. One of those with several floors. She is walking hand in hand with her mother through a crowd when she gets distracted and lets go. When she turns around…she can’t see her anymore. She starts to panic and looks for her among the people, but nothing. She can’t find her anywhere. She becomes more frightened and starts walking faster and faster. She enters one of the dozens of stores, thinking that maybe her mother is there. She goes into another, and then several more, but she still can’t find her. There are adults everywhere, but she doesn’t recognize anyone, not a single face. She starts to panic, feeling as though an eternity has passed. Until an older person approaches her, asks what is wrong and helps her. They walk together until, finally, she sees her mother.
This scenario is used in experiments to study memory. Researchers work with participants’ families to gather information about some real experiences from their childhood. They then tell the participants about these experiences, but include among them a story about getting lost in a shopping mall at around the age of six and eventually being helped by an older person. The participants are later interviewed, and even though the shopping-mall event is completely fabricated, some come to believe that it really happened and even add details that the researchers had never told them.
Elizabeth Loftus (or “Beth,” as her students call her) is one of the leading experts on how our memories are formed, how they can become distorted and why they can fail us. In one of her publications in the scientific journal Learning & Memory, she notes that across different studies using this technique, known as “lost in the mall,” around 30% of participants came to accept or develop some degree of memory for an experience that had never actually happened. In other words, they “remembered things that never happened,” she explains.
Beth studied Mathematics and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and later, in 1970, earned a PhD in Mathematical Psychology from Stanford University. While in graduate school, she took a social psychology course taught by Professor Jonathan Freedman. Until then, her work had been primarily theoretical, but she wanted to focus on practical applications.
Her interest in studying memory caught Freedman’s attention, and he invited her to collaborate on a research project, becoming one of her mentors. “He was fundamental in teaching me how to be a researcher,” she recalls. Others she says influenced her work included Patrick Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson, former president of the University of California, whom she says she “sometimes had to approach almost by surprise.”
According to Loftus, false memories can emerge under fairly ordinary circumstances, even when there is no real intention to deceive. Our memories do not preserve every detail perfectly, and over time, some things can lose their clarity and become mixed with new information. “It can contaminate memory,” she explains. For example, a conversation in which someone mentions an incorrect detail, a theory from a police officer that is eventually passed on to a witness, or a comment on social media or in the news can influence how a person remembers what happened. Loftus calls this phenomenon the “misinformation effect,” which occurs when information received after an event subsequently alters the memory. This can make it harder to distinguish which information came from the original experience and which was introduced later.
Sometimes all it takes is changing a single word. In 1974, Loftus and psychologist John Palmer showed a group of students videos of car accidents and then asked them how fast the cars were going when they collided. The question was virtually identical for everyone, except for the verb used to describe the impact. Those who heard a word suggesting a more violent crash, such as “smashed,” estimated higher speeds than those who heard a more neutral word. In a second experiment, the researchers showed participants another accident and, a week later, asked whether they had seen broken glass, even though there had been none. Those who had received a description suggesting a much more violent collision were more likely to say yes.
One of the central ideas behind this work is that memory does not work like a camera that records everything we experience so that we can later replay it exactly as it happened. Remembering is, in fact, a process of reconstruction. When we try to recall an experience, we use fragments of what we lived through, but we can also incorporate, as we saw in the experiments above, information we received afterward, and even add some assumptions of our own. In other words, memories are not perfect copies of the past.
This distinction is particularly important because when this kind of research moves into the real world, especially into a courtroom, it can become the subject of intense debate. Throughout her career, Loftus has been asked by lawyers to serve as an expert or consultant in a number of legal cases in the United States. “In a criminal case, the memory expert appears in court to explain the science of memory,” she clarifies. Her involvement has often generated controversy, particularly in highly publicized cases. Some of these cases could be especially difficult, including those in which she was called by the defense in proceedings involving sexual harassment and even rape.
These interventions can be critical because the testimony of a victim or witness can carry enormous weight when determining what happened and who was responsible. Through decades of research, Loftus has shown that confidently recounting a memory does not necessarily mean that the memory is accurate. Understanding the limitations of memory can help prevent convictions based on mistaken identifications or inaccurate memories, but it can also be used to challenge testimony that is true. “Sometimes I get criticized,” she says. At one point, some students at the University of California, Irvine, even expressed concern about what they believed could be the consequences of her work for survivors of abuse and called for her removal from the faculty.
And in this sense, the fact that human memory is susceptible to error does not necessarily mean that a testimony is entirely false. In the same way, remembering an event with absolute certainty does not mean that every detail is correct. Even someone who remembers an event correctly can get things wrong. That is why it is important to emphasize that scientific research on memory cannot, by itself, determine whether a person is telling the truth.
Loftus maintains that her role as a scientist and expert in these cases is not to decide who is guilty or innocent. “It is not my place to judge (…)” she has said. Her role, she explains, is to describe what science can tell us about memory. She also says that this work allows her to connect her scientific research with real-world problems. “I have real cases that I can bring into my classes,” she says. The documentary Memory Wars, directed by German filmmaker Hendrik Löbbert, explores precisely these tensions surrounding her work and the debate over false memories.
Although our memories can change and even incorporate new information, this does not mean that we need to distrust everything we remember. Rather, we should recognize that human memory is more complex and more malleable than we intuitively think. In other words, we need to be especially careful when a memory can have consequences for another person’s life.
Perhaps that is why the shopping-mall experiment is so fascinating. Some people came to believe that they had actually gotten lost, remembered the fear, imagined the person who had helped them and even reconstructed details from that day. For them, the memory can feel completely real. The only problem is that the day never happened. And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable question left by Loftus’s research. What happens when what we remember with absolute certainty did not happen exactly the way we remember it?
