Speaking of Psychology - How Memory Can Be Manipulated (SOP91)

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Our memories may not be as reliable as we think. Once we experience an event, most of us likely assume that those memories stays intact forever. But there is the potential for memories to be altered or for completely false memories to be planted, according to Elizabeth Loftus, PhD. Loftus, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine, is an expert on human memory and she discusses how our recollections of events and experiences may be subject to manipulation. Join us online August 6-8 for APA 2020 Virtual.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, this is Caitlin Luna, host of Speaking of Psychology. This podcast was recorded live during the 2018 APA convention in San Francisco. This episode is about how our memories may not be as reliable as we'd like to think. As always, we want to hear from you, so please email me at K-Luna at APA.org. If you have any comments or ideas for us, that's K-L-U-N-A-A-A-D-Rg. I'm joined by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a distinguished professor of the University of California, Vine. Dr. Loftus is well known for her research on human memory, notably false memories. Dr. Loftus has been honored by APA's review of general psychology as one of the 100 most eminent

psychologists of the 20th century. Welcome, Dr. Loftus. Thank you. It's wonderful to have you here today. My pleasure. So your research tells us something I would think is unsettling about our minds, that our memories aren't set in stone, that they're basically subject to manipulation. So can you explain that a bit more? One of the things that I and other people who do similar work have shown is that once you have an experience and you record it in memory, it doesn't just stick there in some pristine form, you know, waiting to be played back like a recording device, but rather new information, new ideas, new thoughts, suggestive information, misinformation, can enter people's conscious

awareness and cause a contamination, a distortion, an alteration in memory. And that's the kind of thing that I've been studying for the past many decades. And how can human memories be manipulated? They can be manipulated when people talk to each other after, let's say, some crime is over that they may have both witnessed. They can be manipulated when they are interrogated by an investigator who, maybe has an agenda or has a hypothesis about what probably happened and communicates that to the witness even inadvertently.

People can be manipulated when they see media coverage about an event. Let's say it's a high publicity event that is talked about a lot on television or newspapers. In all of these cases, the opportunity is there for new information, not necessarily accurate information, to contaminate. a person's memory. And what got you interested in this work? Oh gosh, I got interested in studying memory distortion many decades ago. As a graduate student I'd done a little bit of work on human memory.

And then once I got my PhD I wanted to do some work that had a more immediate practical application. And so I thought, well, I know something about memory, but how about looking at the memory of witnesses to accidents, crimes, and other legally relevant events. So I kind of combined an interest in legal issues with some expertise in human memory and produced this line of work. Can you take us back to the early 1990s when you talk about the memory wars? So what was that time like and what was happening? Oh, gee, that, well, in the 1990s and even in maybe the late 80s, we began to see an altogether more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going

into therapy, maybe they had anxiety, or maybe they had an eating disorder, or maybe they were depressed, and they would end up with a therapist who said something like, well, many people I've seen with your symptoms were sexually abused as a child. And there would begin these activities that would lead these patients to start to think they remembered years of brutalization that they had allegedly banished into the unconscious until this therapy made them aware of it. And in many instances, these people sued their parents or got their former neighbors or doctors or teachers, whatever, prosecuted. based on these claims of repressed memory.

So the wars were really about whether people can take years of brutalization, banish it into the unconscious, be completely unaware that these things happen, and then reliably recover all this information later. And that was what was so controversial and disputed. And your work essentially refuted that, that it's not necessarily possible, or maybe brought up to light that this is in. Well, my work actually provided an alternative explanation. Where could these reports be coming from if this didn't happen?

So my work showed that you could plant very rich, detailed false memories in the minds of people. It didn't mean that repressed memories did not exist. Repressed memories could still exist and false memories could still exist and false memories could still exist. But there really wasn't any strong, credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression, and yet so many families were destroyed by this, what I would say, unsupported claim. And going off on what you just said, you said you were at one point sued by a woman who claimed that her mother sexually abused her. And in this situation, you believed the mother was, they had not done this abuse.

And, and you published, and you called it an expose, and it was controversial, and you were sued by this, by this daughter. And you talked about, in your TED talk, talked about the disturbing trend of scientists being sued or, you know, for their work. So can you speak a little bit about that? And what is that, as a scientist, what does that mean? There was a case history that was floating around in the literature, published by a psychiatrist. you know, sort of, and it was being used as the new proof of massive repression.

The case history was anonymous, so it was Jane Doe and John Doe, Momstown, Dads Town. And at some point, I was able to identify the Doe family. And once I found the Doe family, the name. of the family, then I could get into the divorce file and I found all kinds of information that had been left out of this psychiatrist's account. And I found enough information to convince me that that was a very strong likelihood that this accused mother, oddly the mother accused of sexual abuse, was probably innocent. And just being involved in this investigation got me in a lot of hot water.

So, yes, the adult daughter did sue me and sue my co-author and the magazine where we published the expose and some other people. And eventually after years the litigation ended. And you won that in 2016, you won the John Maddox Prize, which recognizes the work of scientists who promote science and evidence but might face difficulty in doing so, or hostility. So can you talk a little bit about that and why you believe it's important to speak out, even when it's difficult, even when you face these tough situations where you might be sued or your name gets called out and dragged through the mud, that sort of thing?

Well, I did win the John Maddox Prize, and I'm very proud of that, and because it is a recognition of standing up for science and in the face of a lot of hostility. And the hostility came not just from a lawsuit or, you know, but other individuals who were, feeling, I guess, that their cherished beliefs were being attacked and would lash out in all kinds of unpleasant ways. But I do think it's important because, I mean, science, you know, is that candle in the dark. And, you know, it is the thing that's going to help make this a better world. So, and it needs to be protected, especially in today's climate. Can you talk about the ethical questions that have come up about your research and how you've responded?

I'll say that again. Can you talk about the, can you speak to the ethical questions that have come up about your research and how you've responded over the years? The ethical questions. Well, I suppose one ethical question is whether, what I do in my experiments is plant false memories in the minds of people in order to study the process. bitty, false memories, and then great big ones. So some people might think that that's not a very ethical thing to do, but number one,

everything is reviewed by the Human Subjects Review Committees at the universities. Many people have done these same kinds of experiments. As far as I know, there's never been an adverse effect. And it has been a scientific contribution that I think has. helped make the world a better place. And you've spoken about the positives of planting false numbers, like how it can be used in a positive way. Can you elaborate a little more on that and what you're, what you mean by that? Yes, one little twist in the false memory work that we did is to look

at the consequences of having a false memory. If I plan a false memory in you, does it have ripple effects? Does it affect your later thoughts or your later intentions or your your later behavior. And we've now shown that you can plan a false memory that you got sick eating a particular food. You got sick on pickles or eggs or strawberry ice cream, and you don't want to eat as much of that food. We've planted false memories that you got sick drinking a vodka drink and you're not as interested in a vodka drink. We've done the opposite. Planted a warm, fuzzy memory that you loved a healthy food, asparagus. in our study, and people want to eat more asparagus.

So if we can control people's nutritional selections and maybe help them live a healthier life, maybe that's not a bad thing to do. Is there any dangers to planning false memories, even if it is for something positive, like you're trying to eat healthier, lose weight, or something like that? Well, the danger, I guess the danger,

is that some evil nefarious people could take this mine technology and put it to some bad use. Just the way we can build a nuclear bomb now and put it to some bad use. Can you talk about the broad implications of your research on criminal law? I think that the work that I and many other people have done on human memory, eyewitness test, testimony, the memory of witnesses and victims to crimes, has had some impact on the legal system. The scientific studies have revealed something that we might call best practices that have been implemented in a number of jurisdictions so that when law enforcement and members of the legal system interact with people who are involved in legal cases, they get the most accurate.

and complete information from people, and we aren't wrongly convicting people of crimes they didn't do. So I see some great impact there. Is there anything we can do to prevent against false memories or to enhance our memories? Oh, you know, if you warn people that somebody might be trying to mislead them or fool them, they can momentarily protect themselves

and kind of fend off the mislead them. information. The problem is that people don't walk around in life with those warnings at the forefront of their consciousness. And so we're going to need to find some other ways of getting people to protect themselves. And can you enhance your memory? Can you, you know, to ensure that maybe the information you do remember is more accurate, or is it even possible? There are things you can do to enhance your memory for usually two simple things are just to pay better attention at the time you're being experiencing something or learning somebody's name at a party for example and then rehearsal and certainly we know the best patterns of rehearsal that are known to maximize the

likelihood that people will remember the information just as we spoke about about prepping for your TED talk, he said you had, it took a many months to prep for memorizing a 16 minute talk. So it's a lot of work to do you memorize something that long and to enhance your memory. I mean, you know, I'd been teaching for decades when I was invited

to do a TED talk at TED Global. And so this was going to be a talk in front of maybe a thousand people in the audience and then it would go out on the TED website and it would

be translated into who knows how many languages. So the exact wording was part of it. And you have to memorize it. And it actually took me about three months to, you know, practicing and talking to the mirror and talking to trees to get it down. And I used a few tricks that I'd learned as a memory scientist, like the method of loci. And so I could even give you the talk right now, even though it's been five years. What are some of those methods, you said? I mean, it's obviously repetition. No, the method of LOSI involves taking a chunk of material that you want to remember

and placing it in a spot, let's say, in your home, and then the next chunk in another spot, and the next chunk in another spot. And then you take a mental walk through your home and you see the chunks. So, for example, I'd like to tell you about a case I worked on involving a man named Steve Titus. Titus was a restaurant manager, and one day he was accused of a horrible crime. So I remember that because I walked to my front door, and there is Steve Titus. Okay, tell them about Titus. And then I go into my house, and there's a portrait over here that my mother-in-law did when I married her son.

I look at, tell them about you, you know. Then there's some pine cones over here. That's the wrongly accused. Tell them about the wrongly accused. So in walking through a familiar location where you've placed chunks of what you need to remember, you can master it. That's fascinating. I definitely need to work on that skill.

Well, if you, there's a fabulous book called Moonwalking with Einstein that, that a, that, a that describes this whole method. It's really a great popular book. That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Lofdes. I really appreciate your time today. My pleasure. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts like APA journals dialogue about the latest and most exciting psychological research and progress notes about the practice of psychology. You can find our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit speaking of psychology.org to find more episodes and resources on the topics we discuss. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna, for the American Psychological Association.