Elizabeth Loftus: The Woman, The Myth

What Loftus is famous for in the field of Psychology is suggesting that repressed memories do not exist, and for her basic theory of memory, which attempts to explain how memories can be malleable, fragile things- especially for children.

Loftus’ work has been used to help combat the use of ‘leading questions’ in interrogations. In a lot of hit television shows involving police or crime investigations of any sort, sometimes there’s a scene of a little boy or girl, and the child is being interviewed. Some interrogators will say something along the lines of, “Did he touch you…here?” and will use a doll to show what they’re referring to. Others might lead a child to a conclusion, and the child will shake his/her head, and everyone assumes it’s the truth. This isn’t always the case, however, though things like that do happen.

In a couple studies Loftus did testing university students, her and a colleague found that people were more likely to try to fit answers to the expectations of the questioner based on the wording of a question. For example, in one study, Loftus and her colleague had 150 college students look at a brief video clip of a car crash. They asked 50 of the students, ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’ and 50 were asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’ The last 50 were left as a control group, and weren’t asked about the speed of the cars. A week later, without being able to watch the clip a second time, they asked the students if they had seen any broken glass in the video. 

Their basic explanation for this is that we have base memories, and each memory is just one memory. This is called the reconstructive hypothesis. When a question was asked after the video clip was viewed, the question became an external piece of information, according to Loftus and her colleague, and was somehow combined with the memory of the crash as it was being encoded, which led some to believe that the crash was more extreme than it was, and that there was broken glass when there wasn’t.

Loftus has received a lot of criticism for her work on memory and how subjective it can be, and to an extent, there’s reason behind it. For one, her experiments are not easily based in real life. As in, eye witness testimonies are probably more reliable when people are actually involved in a car accident and physically there, as opposed to viewing a 4 second clip on a car crash. Secondly, as with everything, association does not necessarily mean causation. Just because there’s a link between the verb choice and how the crash was recalled in the experiment doesn’t mean the wording of the question itself caused the answers to be what they were. Some researchers argue that the memories were the same, and that Loftus herself was using leading questions, and that under appropriate conditions (as in, if test subjects had actually witnessed a real event), the answers would have been different.

Despite Loftus’ research, investigators and interrogators still incorporate leading questions which they often use to get a desired answer out of witnesses and suspects, though it’s suggested that they don’t. More studies may need to be done to assess the validity of her findings, but nonetheless, it’s a compelling thing to say memories are somewhat unreliable and alterable.