The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Elizabeth Loftus

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

In this episode, Lawrence is joined by award-winning cognitive psychologist and author Elizabeth Loftus to discuss her ground-breaking work on false memories, recovered memories, “the misinformation effect” and the unreliability of eye-witness testimony. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm Lawrence Krause. I want to be straight up and say that Elizabeth Loftus is a hero of mine. First, she's a distinguished cognitive psychologist, a member of the National Academy and the American Philosophical Society, and she's been president of the American Psychological Society as well. She serves as a distinguished professor of psychology, law, cognitive science, criminology, and law.

society at UC Irvine. She holds these distinctions because of her groundbreaking work on false memories, implanted memories, and on eyewitness testimony and the misinformation involved, the so-called loftus effect. She's a hero of mine not just because she's discovered all of this, but because she's applied it and has devoted much of her life, often at great risk to her own well-being, subjecting herself to personal and professional attacks, by interfacing with the court system, advising judges and juries, and serving as an expert witness, saving people's lives who've been falsely accused. She's been involved in many high-profile cases from the McMartin preschool, DoJ Simpson, Ted Bundy, and the Duke versus lacrosse team. I wanted to talk to her personally about

what got her interested in psychology and what caused her to reach beyond academia, also about what we know about memory today and what we've learned about eyewitness testimony, reflecting on the recent events, for example, in the Supreme Court and elsewhere. Our discussion was interesting and highly relevant to what's going on today. As always, Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program immediately at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoy the show. Well, Elizabeth, I'm so happy you're here today with me. We go back away, and I've always admired your work tremendously, and I'm really looking forward to having this conversation about memory,

about your experiences, and things that are happening in the world. So let me, let's begin. I never asked you this question, but why psychology? Why did you get involved in psychology? What interested you in it in the first place? Why did you choose that? Oh, psychology. Well, first of all, when I started college, I was a math major.

Good choice. Well, I loved algebra. I loved geometry. When I got to calculus, I didn't really love calculus too much. But I was a math major, and I was going to stick to this because I put so many years into it. But you have to take electives. And I took introductory psychology from a professor at UCLA, Alan Parducci, and it was fabulous. So I was kind of hooked on psychology, took a bunch of other courses in psychology,

and by the time I graduated, I had enough psychology to have a double major. In math and psychology? In math and psychology. Huh. Now, it's interesting that because usually those psychology courses at universities are immense. They're usually the kind of things I would think that would turn people off. Was it a huge class? Oh, yeah.

But it's still, but it was good to have a good teacher. It makes a big difference, I guess. Fabulous, yes. And then, okay, so you had to double major. And then what? Well, then, for a while, I thought maybe I might become a teacher, like a high school teacher and teach mathematics. But one of my professors said, you know, there's this program at Stanford mathematical psychology. And I thought, well, how perfect.

That's my math and my psych. I think I'll go do that. And I got into Stanford to go to graduate school in mathematical psychology. and I really didn't like it very much. I used to go to the Friday seminars at Stanford, the math psych seminars, where the faculty and grad students would present their latest model of behavior. And I would write letters to my Uncle Joe. I would hem my skirt because the skirt lengths were going up and down.

And even the other grad students took a poll, and I was voted. the least likely to succeed because I was so not into it. And I mean, I did okay in the courses and I passed the courses. But you weren't excited. But you did some research, right? You were working actually on your, as I remember from reading some things you wrote, that you were actually working on a PhD project still in mathematical psychology, were you?

Well, my master's thesis advisor and PhD advisor, they were mathematical people. But they also were interested in computer assisted and started. So I was working on their computer-assisted instruction projects. Yeah, okay. And then I did a side project with one of my professors. He said, you know, you're interested in, you're a cognitive person. I'm doing these memory studies. Would you like to help me?

How do you know you were a cognitive person? Well, I think we didn't even call learning. It was called back then. And so you were interested in learning? Yeah, learning. Because you thought of being a teacher. Was there any relationship? Was that why you were interested in learning or no?

No, that was the subfield of psychology, as it was called then. And it became cognitive psychology about the time I was graduating. So I started doing some memory studies, but very different studies than the ones I would do after I got my PhD and continue on with. Let me ask that question, because people often ask me this. I, as a physicist, I think I learned more about physics after I got my PhD than before. I'm just wondering in your case, whether it was similar, that you found that you discovered, or did you get most of the basics, and then it was just applying them? No, I mean, the basics I got were how to, how to be an experimental psychologist,

how to design a study, how to run the subjects, how to do the statistical analyses, how to write up a manuscript. I learned how to do that in grad school. Did they have those human subject things back then, too, where that was a big? I think they came later, where you have to go through human subjects, committees, get approvals. Yeah, they really came later.

And so, okay, so you, so this fellow asked you if you wanted to work in a memory on this project on memory, right? Did you have an interesting memory before that, or was it just then that you began to think about it? I think it was really then. But this was what's called semantic memory. Our memory for words and concepts and the knowledge we have about the world rather than our personal experiences.

Okay. So I did studies of semantic memory. And like give me the name of an animal that starts with the letter Z. Go for it. I'll just say zebra just for fun. I bet everyone says that. Yeah, that's a common one. Is there another?

animal that starts with the... Well, but I, you know, a bird that's yellow. And I think even though I'm colorblind, I'd say canary. Canary are yellow, aren't they? Yeah, many. So that would work. Oh, the one from Big, from Sesame Street. Big Bird. Okay. Anyway, sorry.

Well, so I measured reaction times and I drew inferences about the structure of that kind of knowledge in the human mind. That's what I did with Dr. Friedman. And then, and that's So you eventually got your PhD in? No, I did on the computer assist instruction.

This was a side project. So I was publishing articles with him at the same time as I was publishing with my main advisors. But that was where your passion was. Well, I got more excited about it because I was in control. You know, working on these computer assisted instruction projects, I felt like I was a little, you know, in an assembly line. I was chopping the carrots and somebody else, the peas and somebody else was going to throw it together. The whole picture wasn't there. No, but through the memory studies, I realized I could be an experimental psychologist.

You could control it. It's funny, again, I'm just trying to as a non-by-the-way, I was a subscriber from the time I was 12 to psychology today. I thought, because I wanted to do that when I was younger. So now, you know, I became a physicist, and it's interesting to see the differences. And there's sort of similar things like that in physics and where part of a big experiment, big experimental, collaboration of particle physics experiment, where you're doing this little cog here and 10,000 people are doing other things. And then there are physicists who want to be doing tabletop experiments where they can sort of control the whole thing. And I guess that there's

sort of a similar difference for, and that's what excited you to be to sort of start to finish to be involved in the project. Exactly. Okay. So what it, so, but that entreat, that started you to get interested in memory. Yes. And then, and then what did, well, then, um, this work on, you know, animals, zebras. In fact, I once wrote a paper called How to Catch a Zebra in Semantic Memory, but it was just about that stuff. And it got me jobs, you know. I talked about this stuff and got a job offer from Harvard as an assistant professor,

which I turned down for other complicated reasons. It's not a bad idea, at least for reasons. I know many people have done that and been quite happy. Okay, but so it was, you know, I was having some success with this work. But I then one day, I was teaching in New York at the time, I had lunch with a cousin. She was a lawyer and, oh, you're an experimental psychologist. Well, have you made any discoveries? I said, yes, I have.

Well, give me one. I said, well, I discovered that people are faster to give you the name of a bird that's yellow than to give you the name of. a yellow bird. And they're 250 milliseconds faster, about a quarter of a second. And she said, oh, really? And how much did we pay for that result? And it was that conversation that made me think, you know, I would love to work on problems that had more obvious practical relevance. Okay. I wanted to get to that because, and we'll get to that, because of course, in your career, you have moved in that way in the extreme, many more, much more than most of your colleagues,

your work and your life has become involved in the, intertwined immeasurably in real events and real events that most people have heard of. And we'll get to that. But you already had a predilection and having sort of practical impact in your work. Right. Right. Now, I want to, I want to,

I know that at some point I think you wrote that, that your work in some sense, involved a new paradigm of what memory was. So as you began to evolve, you actually began to think about or change ideas about what memory was. So maybe you can describe in what sense it was a new paradigm.

One of the things that was happening in the field of learning and memory at the time is that people were working with very simple stimuli. They would have people memorize a list of words and learn a list of words and try to remember them after different periods of times.

Every now and then they used stimuli that maybe were a little different, but they were very simple, sometimes nonsense syllables. They were trying to have them be as simple as possible. And when I started my experiments, I wanted them to more closely match the real world. So I started showing people films of auto accidents, and those were my stimuli. And other scientists were not doing that way. So in that sense, that was a little different. Oh, yeah, sure.

But the parent, but the. Am I correct that in that, by the way, in those experiments, you could get people to just to get, and maybe it's a precursor to what would happen later, was it in those experiments where you could get people to infer how fast someone was going by describing an auto accident, in different terms?

Well, you're asking a question that uses a loaded word for how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other, versus how fast were the cars going when they hit each other. And we showed that people said the cars were going faster with smash than hit. So it was already an early indication that you could influence what people thought, by the way, by just giving them loaded words. Yes, but my first thought was I was looking at leading questions. And I could see that the leading questions. and I could see that the leading questions would affect the answer.

Then I showed that those leading questions could affect the answers to totally different questions that you put to a person, often much later. So if I came back to you after I'd asked you the smash question a week later and say, by the way, a few more questions for you. Did you see any broken glass? People were twice as likely to say, yes, I saw broken glass. There wasn't any if we had used the word smash. versus hit. So then I began to see these leading questions as just a vehicle for supplying

suggestive information to people that would affect their memory. And that ultimately would lead to the label of the misinformation effect. You supply people with misinformation and they will often accept it, absorb it into their memory, it causes a contamination or a distortion of I think I've heard that called the loftus effect, actually, from other people. Well, I called it the misinformation effect, but, you know, and that was. Yes. In any case, that's the side. Well, it's a very, it, it, it, the notion for many, many years was quite different about what memory was, you know, going back to ancient times where people thought, you sort of memories and knowledge were, was intrinsic.

And you were just somehow probing what was already there. and never sort of creating memories or memories as dynamic. And then the idea that memories were like tape recorders where they weren't already there, but once they happened, they were in your mind and it was a matter of just going to the right data location and calling them out. And what you began to show,

and have showed, of course, abundantly since then, is that that's not the case at all, that memories are not static and maybe weren't even there in the first place. Well, yes. I mean, and that tape recorder, recorder, video recorder, you know, model of memory is still sadly, widely embraced by some lay people. Yeah. I think most people still think memories, you work hard, you get the memory,

and that's it. And if it's there, if it's a memory, it must have been, it must have happened. Right. Memory studies, as you said, had been sort of, trying to remember the name of an animal name with a letter Z or a series of numbers or facts. And you, you began to, you're, research has involved more stories. Right. Why do you think you were thinking stories versus facts in that sense? What influenced you to think in those terms?

Is it because you were so interested in the way people really work in the real world of trying to remember their own stories? Or what caused you to go in that direction? Well, I think I know, actually. Good. You think you know. No one told you this. No, I think I actually know.

Okay. So there I was, you know, thinking to myself after that conversation with my lawyer cousin where I thought I want to do something that has some practical applicability, something that's more socially relevant. And briefly, around that time, my father was dying of cancer. I wished I could work on cancer, but I couldn't work on cancer because I don't know anything about it. I had no skills. So, but what could I work on that I could be excited about? Well, and then to find out what excited me, I asked myself, well, what is it you like to talk about when you're, let's say, at a party, a dinner party or something, and you can talk about whatever you want. What do you talk about?

And I found myself often talking about legal situations, legal cases. So this made me think, okay, I want to like maybe combine memory. with legal cases. Well, how about eyewitness memory, accidents, crimes, things like that? That's how I got there. So, interesting, and do you think it was because of your lawyer-caut,

or what caused you to be? No, I just... Perry Mason or something? No, it's not... So I remember, you know, one dinner party, okay, here's something that happened in New York. Somebody goes out to his car and kind of a hoodlum is resting on the car

and the owner says, you know, do you think I could get into my car? And the hoodlum starts to annoy him. And there ends up being a tussle and the hoodlum dies. And the owner ends up getting prosecuted. And I thought to myself, well, what's somebody supposed to do if they're getting hassled like that? What was the fair thing to happen? Why is he being prosecuted when he was just defending himself? and so that's what I was talking about.

You had a personal event in your life very young where that happened. Did that impact me? I don't know if you want to talk about it. You don't have to if you don't want to. No, I know what you're referring to because I was being interviewed by a reporter and this experience had just happened to me. And I told this reporter about the experience because it was so amazing to me. That would have been in the 90s.

So that would have been, you know, decades, you know, almost a couple of decades after I started this work. So what happened to me that was so amazing that I told this journalist was a chronicle of higher education writer, as a matter of fact. My mother did drown when I was 14 and now jump ahead. I'm an adult. I've been working on memory for 15 years or more. when I went to an 90th birthday party for an uncle of mine, Uncle Joe. And at this birthday party, a relative made reference to my mother's death from decades, decades before, and said, you know, you were the one who found the body. I said, no, in lying in the swimming pool.

And I said, no, her sister did, my aunt. Oh, no, you're the one who found it. And this relative was so positive, older relative, and it had been so long. And I started thinking, wow, maybe I did. And then I started picturing her in the swimming pool face down. And I started to believe and remember this. And I started to draw inferences that were consistent with my having found it. I remembered that when the fireman came to the place that they gave me on,

oxygen. Well, maybe they gave me oxygen because I was so upset because I'm the one who found the body. And so now I had this memory. A week later, the relative called and said, I'm so sorry, I made a mistake. It wasn't you. It was your aunt who found the body. And I thought, boy, that's what it feels like. That's really interesting. When you have that personal experience exactly what you're working on. Oh, yeah. It was so incredible. By the way, I once finally had the experience of sleep paralysis, which was amazing. So now I could understand these people with these alien abduction memories, how they get started. But anyhow.

Yeah, we'll get to alien abduction because I wanted to ask about it. I didn't read it, but I've spent a lot of time over, undue time over the years sort of in the early days debating alien abduction people. And we'll get to that. Okay. We're talking about John Mack and those guys, yeah. Okay. And that whole issue, which we have.

which I hadn't seen you talk about, but it certainly seemed relevant to, but let's actually step back for those who aren't as familiar with the amazing impact and career and real-world application of your work, which you're, at least in my circles, famous for it, certainly, and rightly so. And that's the work you've done on recognizing that memories can be implanted, that eyewitness testimony may not be or often isn't accurate and is influenced by the way in which it's presented, did you seek out lawyers to help them or did they seek you out? When did it happen?

Well, a very clear path. So I'd been doing this experimental work, showing people these simulated accidents and sometime later crime simulations. I was studying laboratory witnesses, and I thought to myself, you know, I would like to see some real witnesses in real cases out there in the real world. And at this time, I had moved to the University of Washington where I knew one of the chief attorneys in the public defender's office, Phil Ginsburg. So I said, Phil, how about I study eyewitness memory, how about if I consult on a case with you for free,

if you let me just hang out, watch the progression of a witness through a case and so on. So he was working on a case. A woman was accused of murdering her boyfriend and the whole issue was it self-defense or was it murder. And I hung out with him during this case, giving my little input, absorbing the experience for my own benefit as well. And when the woman, she was acquitted, so it was found to be self-defense, there were memory issues, which I explained to the attorney. And so maybe I played a tiny role in this case. When I was done with that experience, I decided to write an article for Psychology Today magazine. And I wrote about some of the early studies. I wrote about the experience with that case, that woman, her acquittal, and how, psychological memory science could intersect with the legal field and maybe make a difference.

And that's when the phone started ringing. So a lawyer said, would you help me with my case? Would you lecture about this to my group? And I started doing lectures to groups of attorneys. I started being asked to consult on court cases. And that's how it started. Then that's your life changed that way. Of course, people asked me out. this because, you know, I've had a variety of trajectories and tried to juggle them in my life with research and writing and communicating. And they ask, you know, has it taken away? As one taken away from the other? And, you know, are you happy you've done this? And of course, it's hard to know about trajectories that were never taken in the future, much less the past.

Having said that, that did change your life. I assume it changed your life in a way that ultimately you were happy with. Well, I would say I'm mostly happy. I mean, most, you know, I have. It's brought a lot of struggle and strife to your life as well. Right. I've had some really difficult times because of people who don't like what I do. But the benefits are, you know, I get to see these real world cases. I get to live these stories. You know, it's true crime up close and personal.

It can be lucrative. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting as a lesson for the academics who may be listening. that real world article, that Psychology Day article, changed everything. It brought you into a whole different set of interactions and opportunities that you never would have had otherwise. I found some similar things that when I, my first time I spoke publicly or wrote anything, one thing leads to another.

And I think it depends on your personal predilection. For some people, they say, oh, gee whiz, I didn't mean for that to happen. But if you're at all in tune with that, if you're at all interested, it's a wonderful way. as an academic to have an impact beyond your normal sphere and to also realize that people are fascinated, not just the applicable, in your case, unlike sort of cosmology where I've never been asked to go at a court case in cosmology directly,

but so it's not that relevant to human affairs in that sense, but people are still fascinated by what's going on and what you're learning in the laboratory. and I don't think people realize how much the public would like to know directly and what a great opportunity is to reach out, and like you did in that article. And then, of course, there are lots of people who could, in your case, use your expertise. And that launched you into a, as you say, it changed your life. It did.

And the magazine back then was exceedingly popular. And it was read not just by psychology people, but, you know, the scientific American kind of crowd. And lawyers. Yeah. Well, and even lawyers read it. Yes. Well, if you can reach the lawyers, you reach everyone. But it was the first magazine I ever subscribed to at age 13.

I had, I still, I was just looking when I was moving recently. And I found the first three issues of psychology today that I still have, which are probably, maybe worth something, but I was, it was fascinating. They had little experiments in them, little, they were wonderful. They had little viewers, and it was three-dimensional viewing and all sorts of neat stuff. So that had, that reached people, and that made an impact. there was this period, which for young people, they may not remember, but if you're old enough, where children were accusing their parents of crime, satanic rituals that had happened 30 years earlier,

and it seemed to be happening all the time. And you played an essential role to my recollection in helping save many people's lives as a result. Do you want to talk about that at all? Because I think it's profoundly important. Okay. Well, so there's a, you took a leap. ahead of a few years. Yeah. So, so. We'll go back. Okay.

Well, there I was. I was, now I was studying what happens when you expose people to leading questions and other forms of misinformation. How does that get incorporated into a person's memory and change their memory for the details of an event that actually did happen? Yeah. They did see a crime scene. They did see an accident.

And now we've made them believe that the car went through a yield. instead of a stop sign or that the bad guy had curly hair instead of straight hair, changing a detail. Lots of court cases where eyewitness memory was disputed and an issue, many cases where the wrong person was identified as being the perpetrator when he really wasn't. And along came this really, really strange case. It was around 1990 where, in fact, I remember getting a lot of fact, I remember getting a

the call from the defense attorney. He said, yeah, I'm representing a guy accused a murder. And the only evidence against him is the claim of his daughter, Eileen. Defendant's name was George Franklin. So Eileen was accusing her father saying that she was like in her late 20s, that 20 years earlier, she'd seen her father kill her little eight-year-old best friend. And she, she was, She repressed her memory into the unconscious, and now, through some process, the memory was back. She said she repressed her memory of, you know, even other murders. She repressed her memory of continual rapes by the father and sexual assaults by other people. So the attorney who said, who was a very experienced, San Francisco attorney, said, what do you know about this idea of repression?

And I said, well, you know, it's kind of this hand-me-down Freudian idea that we banish all this excessive trauma into the unconscious. It's walled off. We have no access to it. But then we can go into therapy or something and become aware of it and reliably recover it all. But when I started to look for the evidence, it was amazing. There was no credible scientific support for this idea. And I explained that to this attorney, but this daughter was so convincing, and she had the support of a psychiatrist who basically blessed her memory and said that's how it works, and you can count on it in so many words. And George Franklin was convicted. So here you have the first American citizen virtually convicted based on a claim of repressed and recovered memory. But what would be happening here? If this memory weren't real, and I certainly suspected that it wasn't and that her memory had all these details could be found in the public domain from this high publicity case, where could that come from?

How could such a rich, deep, complete thing be created in her mind, assuming she wasn't deliberately lying if it didn't happen? I wanted to study that. And so that's what led me into a whole kind of new line of work where we're going to plant a seed of memory and watch it grow into something big. And I began to do those studies, starting in the mid-90s and to this day. So that was the famous case, the Franklin case. Eventually, he was relieved after six years, no? Yeah, good memory. Well, he was convicted.

You must have imputed that. And it was upheld by the next level in California on the next level. But when it got into the federal, a federal judge eventually overturned his conviction. But that, but then in the newspapers, one then started to hear about a wave of not just this, but the weirdest. I mean, that was one, as you say, that young woman had memories of him murdering and raping and we went. But then there were even wilder ones of satanic rituals and rapes and murders and it just seemed to be everywhere. do you want to comment? I mean, that thing doesn't happen accidentally, it seems to me. And I'm wondering the social context of globally, if people read about that, whether you think it maybe affects them, you know, one person feeds off another and it becomes like a chain reaction or why? What happened? Yeah.

Well, it's a good question for a sociologist, but I'll give you my, my, my, my lay thoughts. Yeah, okay. Yes, after the Franklin case, then we saw the following years, celebrities came forward to say, I repressed my memory of horrific sexual abuse. The actress Roseanne said that she repressed her memory of her mother molesting her when she was six months old. I mean, that was jarring to me because I know about childhood amnesia. We don't have concrete, reliable memories for things that happen in the first couple of years of life. And then she accused her father of joining in later. So after the celebrities, we start to see lots of non-celebrities coming forward and accusing

their parents of all kinds of things or their former neighbors or teachers, doctors, whoever. They were, it was members of the mental health profession that were fueling these ideas. They had this repression theory or what I, Harvard psychologist calls folklore, and they were communicating it. They were communicating it in continuing education seminars. They were communicating it to their patients. Was there a book also, I don't know if it was a psychologist, someone who basically said if you think, if you feel like you're abused, you're abused, and even if you don't have the

memory, I forget the name of that book. The Courage to heal was the book. Yes, and it was very popular book. At one point, USA Today said it was the best seven. self-help psychology book out there. And it promoted this repression theory. Then, you know, these North American psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who were fostering these beliefs would get invited to Europe and other Australia, New Zealand,

other parts of the world. And so the infection spread to around the world. I often say that the United States sort of exports It's everything good and bad, and it happens. This was one of those, you know, not so good things. So there were thousands of these cases. And then they stopped. But you played a big role, at least in my memory of it,

and I don't think it's a false memory. Well, I did work on a lot of these cases. And then they took a slightly different. So mostly these were civil cases where a daughter was suing her parents or her other relatives or former neighbors or whatever, based on these claims of repressed and recovered memories, lots of these court cases. At some point, this was a fascinating development. Some of these patients who had developed these rich things that felt like memories started to realize their memories were false. They call themselves retractors.

Oh, okay. Interesting. How does that happen? Yeah. How does that happen? I mean, as a memory scientist, I mean, this is fascinating to me. Sometimes their insurance ran out so they could no longer pay for the therapy that was propping up this belief system. But then these retractors, many of them started suing their former therapists for planting false memories. And those were just regular medical malpractice lawsuits, nothing.

tricky about them and many multi-million dollar verdicts and settlements. And then the therapist became a little more careful before they started. Right. Oh, interesting. And then they really became careful when we saw the third-party lawsuits, where the father sues the therapist for planting false memories in the mind of his daughter. So, okay, so it's interesting that the backlash and sometimes occurs when people realize them for one reason or other, that they recognize them. It's not, you can't, you can, it's very

hard to convince someone that they're wrong. They have to convince themselves. I've found that in science in general. That's why it's so good in physics, because you can, people often have, misconceptions, and you just ask them to follow them through to the logical end and then they realize it's ridiculous. But in this case, it was a matter of just being taken away from that constant reinforcement of that false memory to realize that doesn't make sense. sense. Well, that's one root. That's one root. But yes. Do you think, I was wondering, I don't know the timing of this. So Rosemary's Baby came out. Was it around the same time? I've often wondered, I mean, life follows art for a variety of reasons. But Rosemary's Baby was a movie exactly about

that, right? About satonic rituals and infants and things going on that she wasn't quite aware of. And I'm wondering if that movie had an impact on, do you, have you ever thought about that? I hadn't really thought about that. I don't remember it coming up in a lot of, you know, because I read a lot of medical records, therapy notes, and I could see what the patient and the therapist were talking about. And I don't remember a lot of, gee, I just went to the movies. Well, I mean, not.

I'm just wondering if, you know, when things are popular, and, I mean, that's why I actually wanted to go into the alien thing, because, you know, there was this another wave of repressed memories or invented memories, induced again by psychologists often of alien abduction. Yes. And then when there's one person, there suddenly seems to be many. And they all have similar stories. And one can't help but think what's bubbling in the background of society,

whether it's from a movie or from a popular book, ends up also, even if it isn't implanted by an individual like a therapist, but implanted by society that people can change their memories. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, you're calling to my mind the, the exorcist. Yeah. The exorcist did lead to a whole bunch of people starting to think that they were possessed by the devil, and they started displaying some of those symptoms. Well, and but also, you know, what's interesting to me is people often say, well, you know, if it was just one person, I wouldn't believe it, but there's so many people that are independently coming up with the same thing, therefore must be believable.

But that sense of independence is a fallacy. It isn't there because everyone's subject to the same news. For example, when people report on what the aliens that abducted them look like, they all look the same. Yes. Now, there's two possibilities for that. One, they're really there. Or is it amazing that they all looked like aliens that were shown on the cover of a magazine

at one point? And so those things must have an impact. And therefore, when you see that many people are saying the same thing, one should not assume that these are independent observations. They're all often tightly coupled by the fact that we're all subject to massive amounts of information and influence from newspapers, radio, magazines, and movies. But let me ask you a slightly different question, because your research in this area, which was so effective, was to show that you could impute memories in people effectively.

Maybe you want to give an example or two of that. Well, for the rich false memories, okay. Well, I'll tell you about the first study we did. I mean, the first thing, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to not just change a little detail, but create an entire memory. So first I had to decide what memory should I plant in the minds of these subjects. And as you well know, you're doing research with human subjects. You have to go through the human subjects.

committees, the ethics committee. So I knew that my university committee was not going to take too kindly to a proposal to, I'm going to make people believe that their father raped them in a satanic ritual. So I needed some kind of analog. What was it going to be? It took a couple of years, actually, of chewing on this with grad students and whoever else I could. Interesting. To come up with the idea, something that would be, at least least mildly traumatic if it had actually happened. And that's when we decided we're going to plant a false memory that when you were five or six years old, you were lost in a shopping mall with certain family members there. You know, you were lost for an extended time. You were rescued by an

elderly person, reunited with a family, and that's how we're going to do it. And the way we did it, well, if I were going to do this to you, I would say, Lawrence, you know, I had a conversation with your mother about your childhood. I just spoke to her when she was in Palm Springs, and she told me some things that happened to you when you were about five or six years old. I want to ask you about those things. If you don't remember what she told us about, just say, but if you do remember, let's hear what you remember. Then I'd present you with three true memories, things that your mother really told me did happen to you, and then a completely made-up experience. about how you were lost in a mall, or if you grew up where there were no malls,

then you were lost in a Sears department store or J.C. pennies or wherever, something, big public place. By the time we were done with three suggestive interviews, we had a quarter of these ordinary adults, false weight of the suggestion, and remember all are part of this made-up experience. So that was my first clue that, you could get people to develop these very, what we now call rich false memories. The study got criticized even before, oh my God, even before we published it. I presented it at a professional meeting. It got a little publicity.

And the critic, the therapist could see where we were going with this. And they started to attack it. They said, wait a minute, getting lost is so common. at least show us you can plan a false memory for something that would be more unusual, more upsetting, more bizarre, if it had happened. So other scientists came along, and we too contributed to this growing literature, planning a false memory that when you were a kid, you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard. When you were a kid, you were attacked by a vicious animal. when you were a kid, you witnessed somebody being demonically possessed. That's when I looked into the exorcist and the impact it had.

When you were a Canadian study, when you were a teenager, you committed a crime, and it was serious enough the police actually came to investigate. All of these have been done now and published in top peer review journals and show that it is possible to take ordinary people. and infect them with the seed and out of this... How susceptible we really are to not just peer pressure, but to suggestion. Right.

Now, the attacks originally were, the therapists were attacking you because they were worried that their own imposition of false memories was now going to be subject to skepticism at the very least. But was there attacks? This is a real question. about the ethics of, I mean, is it ethical to impug, you know, false memories into people?

Did anyone ever on the academic review boards or in the press say, you know, as a scientist, you're, is it fair for you to put false memories of people? The issue has come up. Other investigators and occasionally I've joined them in this effort to do something similar with children, with young children. You got your hand caught in a mouse trap. You had to go to the hospital to get it removed. Three to six-year-olds will adopt this false memory and run with it.

And so there was a group that tried to say, you know, that all false memory work with children should be banned. That got beaten back. But, yeah, I've had questions. And in talks that I give about this, people ask me, well, what happens when the experiment's over? Where are these people? And I talk about debriefing and what kinds of reactions.

For what it's worth, we don't have any adverse incidents that I know of. We don't see our subjects again. Like, you might wonder a month later, do they still maybe think they were lost? We don't see them, and we're not allowed to see them. Oh, you're not allowed. You can't follow up. Well, now we have a proposal right now. one of my former grad students is the lead investigator in this joint project to build into the protocol a follow-up to find out, you know, what's left, what's left.

Has it ever, I mean, did it ever personally worry you about that you could do this or that you were doing it? I'm just wondering, I mean. Well, there are a few times in my life when I've been personally worried. I mean, we'll get to some of those because I'm using this. No, not those. No, about the signs. Oh, okay. So, for example, in the misinformation days, when I could distort people's memories for that,

and I would get reprint requests from Russia. Oh. You know, during the Cold War, I'm thinking, do I want to teach them how to do this? But I would fulfill the reprint requests, of course. It's an idea that knowledge is knowledge. Exactly. Exactly. We can't censor it.

I would feel terrible if somehow I played some significant role in getting a guilty person, an acquittal, and that guilty person goes out and commits some horrendous crime on somebody else. So far, that hasn't happened. Even in Ted Bundy, it could have happened, except for the fact that when I was involved in the very first, first Bundy trial, 1976, I think it was. He was accused of aggravated kidnapping in Utah. He was a first-year law student. We didn't know he was the Ted Bundy. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we didn't know. Yeah, it was just a person who could have been innocent. Well, the Ted Bundy, we would learn later who he was, but he was just Ted, a first-year law student who drove a Volkswagen and was accused of, and there were some questions about the identification. Yeah, yeah, they're a real

questions. But I did testify in that trial. It was a bench trial, so the judge made the decision to convict Bundy anyhow. So Bundy is then shipped off to Colorado to stand trial for a suspected murder, you know, that he possibly committed in Colorado. But I didn't have to worry, at least in that case. Because he'd been convicted. Because he'd been convicted. Yeah. But again, for people who aren't as familiar,

the point is that I witness, well, why don't you talk about eyewitness testimony and how it's sometimes abused by this system and how other times it's also fallible? I think it's really important for people to realize. Because most people, I think many people still today think that if you are in a court case and someone says, I saw that, that that's unimpeachable.

Well, no, it's not. And I mean, even a few years ago when I gave a TED talk, I had to think about, well, which case do I want to talk about? I felt I should talk about one of them. And I talked about the case of Steve Titus. Titus was a restaurant manager. He was, you know, engaged. He was a love of his life. Long story short, he gets accused of committing a rape. He can't believe this is happening, and he ends up getting convicted. Yeah. And his life is destroyed.

It was only because of a Seattle Times journalist who investigated and found the real rapist. That's why we need double-blind experiments in science, because it's really easy to misinterpret the results of an experiment in a drug study in all sorts of studies. And in the real world, if we don't follow those procedures, it's really easy to affect the results of an experiment just by how you perform it rather than what actually happened. And when it comes to someone's life, we've got to be pretty careful. And I think it's so important to have learned those things through your work.

So maybe just walk people through a little bit, maybe in that case or another case, of how eyewitness testimony, how the experiment can be done wrong. If it's a scientific experiment, how it's done wrong by the police or the court system in a few cases. Well, one thing that happened in the Bundy case is when the victim, and she really was a rape victim, when she first attempts to identify, she points to Titus and says, you know, this one's the closest. She's not very confident. But by the time she gets to trial, absolutely sure, that's him. What happened in between? What made her so confident? Well, there's a very good chance that it was the police officer who had an agenda, who believed it. it was Titus, who communicated and possibly maybe even fudge some information. There were suspicions about that and how he may have altered a license plate and so on, fed her information

that inflated her confidence. So now when she goes to the trial and says, that's him, I'm absolutely positive. That's compelling. And the jury had no trouble convicting him. I didn't testify in the criminal trial. They decided that they didn't need to have a memory expert because they had an alibi, which was a phone record. And it turns out that they were unprepared for the fact that the prosecution just moved the time of the rape so it fit with the phone record. And he didn't have that as an alibi anymore. But be that as a may, it's an example of how. When the police or the person conducting the investigation, doing the investigation, has an idea, has an agenda, has a hypothesis, they can even inadvertently communicate that and contaminate the witness, artificially increase their confidence, feed them details, even unwittingly.

And so I and others, you know, have tried to make proposals to, how can we minimize the chances of this happening? and you hit on one with blind testing. Well, you know, I think the thing is that it happens in science, it happens in physics all the time. It said, as Fox Maldar said in the X-Fald, we want to believe. If you're a scientist and you have a hypothesis and you perform an experiment and it agrees with your hypothesis, it's very tempting to believe you're right.

And it was Richard Feynman, who said it most eloquently. In science, we should try not just to prove ourselves right. We should try equally hard to prove ourselves wrong. And I think it's very tempting. in the legal system is say, well, this seems to work. My hypothesis works. Let's just run with it instead of trying to find all the reasons you're wrong, because of course you've got a lot of cases and you've got people's lives on the line. And that's the real danger, it seems to me, is that we don't try to prove ourselves wrong, at least in that aspect. The prosecutors don't

naturally try and prove themselves wrong by inclination. None of us want to prove ourselves wrong. That's part of the training of being a scientist in some sense to overcome that natural tendency to want to believe. I don't think people realize, sometimes, for example, in lineups, and I learn from reading some of your stuff, of the remarkable things that are done in lineups in order to get someone to point to the person

that the police want to be the suspect. Maybe you give a few examples. I don't want to impugn the police all the time, but I think it's important to realize these things actually happen. Well, they can go from minor to, I worked on one, case, for example, where a six-pack, six photographs is shown to an eyewitness. He says, I really don't

identify the perpetrator. And the officer said, I saw your eyes drifting down to number six. Take a look at number six. So they can do things. Well, that happened in this actual case. And they can do even really extreme things. I mean, there was one case where the guy was robbed. You said the robber was black, goes to a lineup. There's only one black and, you know, four or five whites in the lineup. And, you know, when the sheriff has asked, why did you put together that particular lineup? He said, well, we have a small town here, very few blacks. He felt he should have a lineup that's representative of the town.

So, yeah, bad things can happen. But I think now, you know, through cooperations with law enforcement, lawyers, psychologists, and so on, they're learning. best practices. By doing what one needs to do as a scientist, which is to point out uncertainties, you've been attacked and severely attacked, right? I mean, your own, in some ways, career and life has been, has been affected by that. And I think it's important to point out how in an effort to just at least promote the notion of that we have to be responsible, you've had to deal with real repercussions of that that affected your life. And maybe we could talk about that a little bit if you don't mind. No, I don't mind. But when I was the eyewitness lady and I was looking at crimes that

really did happen, victims that really were victims, maybe there's a mistaken memory, mistaken identification. Yeah, I mean, yeah, a few prosecutors were irritated. Yeah. Because it was mostly the defense in criminal cases that wanted to introduce this kind of information into the case, the scientific information. And every now and then a prosecutor might say something a little nasty. But for the most part, the intellectual discussion amongst the professionals and the debates and so on were pretty healthy. And so, for example, you know, I had one healthy debate about the nature of memory with a Johns Hopkins professor. And, you know, after we duke it out in the pages of the journal, he would ask me for a letter of recommendation when he was being considered for another job or a promotion.

It was that kind of fairly healthy. When it got ugly is when I moved into the world of repressed memory and started to question the therapists, some therapists and what they were doing, what they were doing to their patients and how they may be contributing to the development of these traumatic false memories. And you were sued and you've been and. Yes, I was. And had to go through, and your university, too, no? Well, what happened, so now I was involved in a lot of these repressed memory cases. And a psychiatrist, I'd heard this psychiatrist was, you know, giving presentations about a case history of his. A woman who had recovered memories of her mother molesting her when she was five and six years old.

And the psychiatrist had basically blessed the abuse story back then when the now woman was a child. The mother lost custody and visitation of her little six-year-old daughter. Daughter went to the biological father and stepmother. And now years later, the psychiatrist is interviewing the now woman. And right there on tape, she supposedly recovers her repressed memory of this abuse. So this is now being used as the new proof of repressed memory. I think this is the fisciest story I've ever heard, but it's all anonymized because when he writes the article, it's Jane Doe, John Doe, Mom's Town, Dadstown. Maybe there were 280 million people in America at that time. How am I going to find the Doe family to get to the bottom of this?

And one summer I did. Wow. And yeah, I did. And once I found the name of crack the identity, then I could get into the divorce file. And once I got into the divorce file, then I found evidence that convinced me that this mother was innocent. But before I even wrote anything about the case, the daughter complained to my former university, one of your faculties, looking into my life, I'm upset. And, with 15 minutes notice, they came to my office and seized my files. So now I was under investigation, but for what? For what? I mean, I worked on so many cases. This one I just happened to be working on for free.

Yeah. I wasn't retained or brought in by a lawyer, but that I felt there was an injustice out there. And by the way, I had gone to the city to meet the mother eventually once we found her. And they put me under investigation. Eventually, you know, you were an academic so many years, you know, when can they come and seize your files? Maybe if you're accused of faking data, maybe they can come and take your books or whatever. Wasn't that?

Plagiarism, maybe. It wasn't, nothing was written yet. It became an investigation of, did I violate human subjects regulations by not getting permission when I, I went and interviewed that mother, whom I thought was falsely accused. And so that became the investigation. I was gagged during this investigation. It lasted almost two years. And when I was finally exonerated of any wrongdoing, you know, I was pretty upset by the treatment. And, you know, the money I had to spend on an attorney to defend, help defend me. But, and nine months later, I was still upset, and that's when I was offered this fabulous job by University of California,

Irvine, and I ended up taking the job. Also, right at that time, I published the expose. And she was still Jane Doe, John Doe, Mom's Town, Dad's Town. But it was then that she said, I know that was me, and this is liable, slander, I'm upset, and she sued. Well, but, you know, but it turned, well, I've often found that sometimes when you're forced to make changed by something it seems awful. In the end, it can be very beneficial. In your case, it was. You told me that moving to California and a new position just changed a lot. Well, it did. I mean, I, you know, I moved in my late 50s. I didn't really want to leave particularly, but once I got to this new university that, you know, embraced me and gave me a title of

distinguished professor and, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up my lab and treated me with the respect that I had been so longing for in the previous two years. And then wonderful colleagues. So it's been a great move, and I'm glad, and even if it was born out of tragedy. How has your perception of yourself changed by your recognition of the fallible nature of memory? How has it changed the way you view yourself? Has it changed? changed it at all? Have you personalized that? Once I realized that I could plant really rich, big, false memories, and it would affect people's behaviors. I could make people believe they got sick eating strawberry ice cream and they're not as interested in eating it anymore

and they don't eat as much of it, for example. I could make them have a warm, fuzzy memory about a healthy food like asparagus and they want to eat it more. could make them have a false memory. They got sick drinking a vodka drink as a teenager, and they're not as interested in a vodka drink. So should we, how should we use this mind technology that we're capable of? Should we use it to make people feel happier or healthier? And I got criticized again. There she goes, you know. Actually, the criticism came when I said, therapists maybe can't do that. They're not supposed to use deception,

even if they think it's in your best interest. But nothing to stop a parent from doing this with their, you know, overweight teenager or obese child or whatever. Plan a little false memory, make them not eat so much pizza. Then the critics

started saying, you know, she's advocating that parents lie to their kids. And my first reaction was, you know, hello Santa Claus, but Yeah, but. Or the whole, I mean, that's what modern advertising in our society is, is trying to get people to change the behavior for one reason or another using whatever techniques. But using deception makes people nervous. It doesn't make me so nervous.

Interesting. And maybe it's because I know that we have all these bits of fiction in there already. What's a little more if you can prevent someone from getting diabetes and a shortened lifespan and all the things that go along with obesity. I mean, what's a little bit of fiction? Well, our lives are full of fiction. We create our own fictions in some sense, I guess. So I know that, and it doesn't bother me so much.

Well, I find it myself, I create fictions in order to do things. I say, oh, you know, if I want to motivate myself to do something, I'll build it up in my mind so that, you know, if it's exercise or something else. And in order, we all, I think, as I don't know, Lewis Carroll said, we believe six impossible things before breakfast just to get up in the morning, and be motivated to go to work or do whatever we're going to do. And you just say, I heard a rumor that you like this. I just saw a movie about that, so it comes to my mind.

But with great, but on the other hand, with another movie thought, with great power comes great responsibility. As we learn, I mean, this is an issue for the future because we are becoming presumably more, especially with the massive amount of information that's available now on the Internet at Google or anything else. We are learning what people want and how people change their behavior.

And are you concerned that with that great power comes too much responsibility in the sense that we can effectively cause people to do whatever we want them to? Well, maybe you can... When I learned about deep fakes recently, I thought, whoa, this is going to be a problem. Because I used to, you know,

I used to say that the take-home lesson from my work is just because somebody tells you that something with a lot of confidence and detail and emotion doesn't mean it really happened. Go out and get independent corroboration. People say, well, what would that be? Well, maybe photographs or maybe a video. That could be independent corroboration. But now with the technology for Photoshopping and the deepfakes,

so you can create a situation where it looks like anybody is saying or doing whatever it is you want them to say or do, that they didn't say or do, where, it's going to be tough. It is going to be tough, but I guess the point is that fortune favors the prepared mind. If we don't realize how, if we don't do those studies, if we don't know how malady we are, then we are automatically more susceptible to intentional efforts to affect us in either vicious or malicious ways. So ultimately, I guess I kind of feel that for better or worse, even if the knowledge is dangerous, refusing to explore the knowledge is more dangerous.

At least that's my own view, I guess. That's been my view, too. See, but on the other hand, that's why I always tell people I'm so happy I do cosmology, because what I'm studying the future of the universe has no, has no impact on everyone's everyday life. So I don't have to worry about those, literally, I mean this in not a completely facetious way. I even had to worry about those deep ethical issues of how my research might have a direct effort. It, of force, affects the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe, and I love that, but I'm personally saved from those deep questions that you've had to deal with.

Do you have a good memory, by the way? Well, it's pretty good. But, you know, I think I'm just as susceptible to these. Do you remember your first memory? For a long time, I thought my first memory was a happy day when I went to see the greatest show on Earth. I was, for years, that was my earliest memory. And if you, we play this game in psychology, what is your earliest memory? And how old were you?

And I figured, you know, I figured maybe I was four or something like that. That's when some people have an earliest memory. But one day I was in a bookshop, all grown up, studying memory. And there was a book on movies, the history of movies. And I thought, I think I'll look up the greatest show on earth and found out that I was eight years old at the time that was released. So that wasn't my earliest memory. I don't know what is now because that's the one I hung on to for all these years.

Yeah, I've thought, I mean, I have a bunch of early memories, but I don't know. I don't know why, but maybe because I'm naturally skeptical. I don't know. I've always wondered whether they were real memories or whether there's something my mother told me about falling in a swing pool. And I've always been suspicious that there wasn't a real memory I have.

I vividly have it now. And I vividly remember the first time we met. And when we were in an elevator at an atheist meeting talking about a talk you gave, do you remember that? No, I remember the one where you were giving a talk at a skeptics meeting. Okay, no, I was trying to impute a memory. Oh, really? Oh, okay.

Actually, yeah, you could have got me going on that. I was going to, I just felt too guilty, but I was going to try. You could have gotten me going on that one. And in terms of memory, can you close your eyes for a second, just a second? Close my eye. color of my eyes? I mean, I don't know. I'd guess brown, but that's good.

I wouldn't be able to answer that either. They're green, but it's okay. I wanted to see. But, yeah, I'm not good at observing. Oh, I'm colorblind, which I suppose gives me a... Oh, really? What kind of colorblind? Well, sort of blue-green and red-green.

It's a mixture of those two. What happens at a stoplight? One in the top, the one in the bottom. No, I can often tell the difference, but not always, surprisingly. And I think it's one of the reasons. by the way, why I also got it as a theoretical physicist rather than an observational physicists. And rather than a biologist, I mean, because, you know, plants and treat, there were sort of being able to distinguish flora and fauna became difficult for me. And I think

that's one of the reasons why perhaps move towards the physical sciences rather than the biological sciences. My mother wanted me to be a doctor. But there were many reasons, actually. Of course. And she took a long time to not to get over that. By tell, you can implant memory, you can implant testimony in people the same way you can implant memories, I assume. So does the work you've done have, has anyone explored its impact on interrogations as well as just court cases? Well, the closest we've come is I have a collaborator who is, has a sleep lab at Michigan State University. And we've published a few papers together with some of my graduate students on sleep deprivation. You keep people up all night or you allow them to sleep and then put them through some of these false memory tasks or false confession type situations.

And we find that there are conditions. Sleep deprivations can, under certain conditions, make you more susceptible and more likely, many more times more likely to confess to a wrongdoing that you didn't do. Since those interrogation, the so-called torture techniques often involve this massive sleep deprivation. It doesn't seem like it's a very good idea. Has that, but absolutely, but has that scientific work at all flowed into the popular consciousness or into the debate nowadays about the usefulness of those kind of what I would call torture? Well, there are people who say it works and say they have a study and some people who say there is no. Oh, there are some people, because I kind of thought there was convincing evidence that you don't get much more information

and that the information you get is dubious because people will not only just to avoid the pain, they'll confess to anything, but under conditions, as you say, they can be convinced that they did do something. Right. Well, yes. And that's usually with some suggestion that they can be convinced. But, no, the people who want to promote the continued use of these aggressive methods claim they have some evidence. I haven't seen it. Yeah, I don't know of any. Yeah, it's interesting. I didn't know a few. you knew of any evidence because I'm in my own lay persons looking at this I've never seen any evidence quite the on the whole I've seen the opposite which makes me skeptical and dubious so even if

aside from the moral and ethical issues of whether you have a right to torture people there's the question of the of the utility of it and and if so even if you don't have a ethical ethical and moral issue you should have a question about whether it really works ultimately that's what matters does it work I mean that's one of the things that matter and then the next question and then the question is, do you have a right to do it and is ethical to do it? And we can have our own views on that. Another aspect of the modern implications, what about modern technology, like smartphones and the impact on memory? I know there's an impact on the way young people, whether they can read long things, I mean, longer than a tweet now, read chapters of books or books even. That's changed by the

fact that most people read on their cell phone, short, concise, either 200, you know, letter combinations or something more. What about the fact that we can, we don't have to remember facts or details or even stories. We can access it. We all have in our pocket now a thing that allows us to access a world of information and misinformation, albeit. Does anyone sort of looked at the impact on that study of memory? Somebody did a study. I can't even tell you the names, but it's like floating around my, a few years ago, not that many years ago, that showed that if you could, if you, if If you know you can look it up, you're less likely to remember it. But, I mean, the way as a memory person, the thing I most notice is, you know, I don't know people's phone numbers anymore.

Yeah, yeah. Because it's just hit the button or hit their face with their picture. Yeah, exactly. I was just thinking, I didn't know my, I can't remember my stepdaughter. I'm good with numbers, but I have to think a lot about exactly. You never do that. It's always, and when you're asked, even for your own telephone numbers, it's really kind of sometimes for a lot of people have a hard time. knowing what their own number are. And it'll be interesting to see how that, how, but of course, the problem is that the fact that we know we, in principle, have a reliable source is always a

problem because the internet isn't a reliable source. No, it's not. And we're even influenced by fake news, even when we know it's fake. Even when we know it's fake. And I think that's a real concern. That's one of the reasons, by the way, as a scientist, that's why I spend so much time trying to talk about skepticism and the technique. Because the whole, success of science, it seems to me, is built around trying to overcome our natural tendencies to recognize how susceptible we are to incorrect information. And science is nothing other than a process that works to weed out the wrong stuff. And that's why it's useful in society, because because it's so non-intuitive and yet so necessary if we want to separate the wheat

from the chaff. And for me, that's the whole reason why I think science is relevant as a process, to society and why I've sort of gotten a lot involved in that. You've now had this great experience with the legal system. Eyewitness testimony is an issue. I think you've talked about changing what the legal oath swearing

testimony in courts and how we might change it. What can we do to improve the legal system based on what we know? Of memory and sworn testimony. I mean, I'm sure there's no magic bullet, but I'm sure you've also

thought about ways to improve that. Well, I mean, there's there are so many little specific things that can be done and that have been advocated by people in my field. The blind testing is one of them, that the person

who's conducting the investigation, let's say the lineup where somebody's trying to identify a potential perpetrator, shouldn't know who the suspect is. And the reason it's so important to have that person be blind to who the suspect is because you don't want them inadvertently queuing the witness and you don't want them giving

feedback, which is going to artificially inflate the confidence. So that's one, that's probably the number one recommendation as far as lineups are concerned. But there are others there too, instructing the witness that the perpetrator may or may not be in the lineup. It's just as important to exonerate the innocent as find the guilty person. You want to take the pressure off of people to pick someone. Then there are discussions of who should be in the lineup with the suspect. What should the others look like? And you might think, well, they should look sort of similar. But it's not so simple. You have to take into account the description that the person gave. Yeah. So you don't just make sure that they're all white males with dark hair and

roughly the same height. But if the description said, you know, a mole on one cheek or or a straggly beard or something like that, then you have to make sure that that is taken into account in putting together that test. Then, okay, at the time of the trial, you've got jurors out there who are coming in to participate and they've got beliefs about memory that are wrong. They've got beliefs that are either unsupported by science

or even contradicted. So how are we going to educate them? And many people have suggested, most recently, the National Academy of Sciences, that we need more education of these jurors, either through jury instructions that a judge can deliver or through expert testimony that an expert witness can deliver so that these jurors get educated and they are making their verdicts based on accurate scientific information. Those are just a few of many things that— Sure. Well, they're all set up. What about not just educating jurors? How educated are the prosecutors, the lawyers, and the judges? Well, that's, you know, that's another thing. I mean, you know, lawyers and prosecutors and defense attorneys and who then go on to become judges, some of whom, some of them, you know, they've got a lot of things they've got to learn. Yeah. And so they, memory's just one of them. Yeah, exactly. And it becomes much, well, that's an interesting case. I've, we've had, we've had to.

and debates about ultimately whether AI would be a much better, and it'll happen, I'm sure, in the legal system where people will be placed by AI because they have access to so much more information than mere humans do in terms of being able to, because the requirement, the knowledge, the technical issues that are being debated, there was an article in New York Times a while ago about how in certain cases, the technical questions become so sophisticated. It's hard for the jury, it's hard for the lawyers, it's hard for the judges. And so some, as society of we're going to have to consider that in the legal system, I think. Absolutely.

Plus, by the way, I was thinking about your cue thing when you talked about the lineups. A great example, it seems to me, to use is that all the examples of the animals who could count or who knew how to answer questions, and the owners didn't realize that they were cueing the animals. These cues are very subtle, and you can easily not be aware of them, even if you're trying to do something fairly. Yes. Yeah.

And it's a challenge that we all have to recognize. And I think society's got to evolve. But ultimately, as you say, knowledge is the, at least is one way to help. Exactly. It may not be the only way. In terms of the outrage to the things we're learning, and there is outrage about a number of these things, that often tells us about ourselves. How do you think it reflects, what does it say about ourselves that we're

we're outraged to learn that we are not reliable, I guess. What it's taught me, well, actually, this and another bit of work that I haven't told you about, has taught me how much people cherish their memories, and they don't want to give them up, even when they're going to be harmful. And I saw that so clearly. So I am challenging their memories, and that makes it. people very uncomfortable. But where I really saw it clearly is when I collaborated on a study of there are drugs, their clinical trials, testing drugs that you could take after a trauma

that would weaken your memory and minimize your chances of getting post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, we're not doing those clinical trials. Other people who are in a position to do that kind of work are doing that. But we enter this debate by just asking people. Let's say you were a victim of a horrible crime. Somebody bashed you in a park and robbed you, you know. You go to the emergency room and the doctor says, we got this drug. It'll weaken your memory for this. It'll reduce your chances of getting post-traumatic stress disorder.

Do you want the drug? And to my shock, like 80% of people said, no, I don't want that drug. We changed the scenario a little. they still don't want the drug. I mean, and they have different reasons. I don't know what the side effects will be, what other memories are going to go. I might want these memories.

Even when we tell them how bad PTSD is for people, they still don't want the drug. So why? And because they're afraid of not letting go of those memories. Yeah, I think we identify our memories, as I said, who we are, what we are. I mean, what are we in some sense, except that some total of our memories for many people.

Yeah, it must be terrifying. But I, you know, I did, my, one of my collaborators, she said, I wouldn't take it. And I said, I would, you know, but I want to, you know, I want to dive an overdose of morphine. I just don't want to feel the pain. Yeah. But I'm in the minority.

Apparently, it's interesting. That's, I was surprised that people will be willing to avoid something. really won't be willing to avoid something really bad by doing some minor intervention. Well, weakening their memory is not something that sounds appealing to people. Well, speaking of not appealing, the last thing I want to go to, and I think it would be, we have to, it's the elephant in the room, is how this relates to current things where there is a lot of emotion attached. But I think it's important that we address some of the current issues. For example, let me bring up the Kavanaugh hearings.

And there's an example of that people feel very strongly one way or another about memories in the case of a person who clearly was earnest, at least one person, who was earnestly had memories that may or may not have happened. And no one, people fall, and even my bringing it up, people I'm sure are going to be upset with me bringing it up. But the possibility that it might have happened. other people will be upset at the possibility that did. But let's talk about that, because I think we have to try and relate it to the modern times a little bit. Well, okay.

I mean, since I soaked myself with that testimony at the time, and here I am somebody who has been questioning 30- and 40-year-old memories for the last two or three decades and saying, you need to know, much more. You can't just use the way the person tells the story and decide it must be true. That's what the rest of the world is doing. Yeah. And I had to, you know, I felt like a, you know, sort of fish out of water dealing with a whole society that just wanted to uncritically accept the story because it, because she was so appealing and because she was confident and because she was detailed

and because she was emotional and not ask, you know, how exactly did that memory come to be? But, and it's not popular. And, you know, the Kavanaugh people tried to get more information about how the memory came to be, but were thwarted.

I mean, and of course, when they want to see the rest of the therapy records and find out, is that what did it? It's done it in so many hundreds of other cases. Well, that, for me, was a signal that it came out in therapy. I must have get it. Because of probably reading so many things, I'm always suspicious when things come out after the fact, well after the fact, in therapy, but maybe that's just a bias on my part. Well, but we, you know, we didn't, we didn't learn all there was to learn

to, to make a more informed decision about what really happened. Let's hit another hot button issue that's going to impact people. Because I think you wrote an op-ed, you were just years ago about it. But recently, you know, Woody Allen has become a name who's, again, you mentioned the name. People fall on one side or another. Many years after the fact, which surprises me, after this was adjudicated, and it's recently come up in a context, and it's all based on a childhood memory. I don't know what your op-ed was about it, so I'd like to hear what your context was in that case. Well, that, you know, that was written some time ago when, you know, there's a seven-year-old daughter who's in part of a ugly, messy separation, custody, whatever situation, who makes an accusation that's thoroughly investigated by, I think, the Yale investigators, and no finding, of any abuse.

But what I've noticed recently now is the seven-year-old, who's now grown up, says, hey, people didn't believe me before. Will you believe me now? And she's come forward in the midst of Me Too saying, won't you believe me now? I was reading the L.A. Times, my hometown newspaper just last year, and a therapist wrote a letter to the papers saying as a therapist, I believe her memories are real because they have a ring of authenticity about them. I'm thinking to myself, what is ringing for this therapist who's never met the child or the adult woman? Probably what's ringing is that she looks emotional and detailed when she

tells the story. And it's coherent and cogent and well-spoken. Right. But again, I mean, you know, yeah, this is a, well, anyway, there's a lot of factors in that case that are, but I'm surprised how many people, well, I guess I'm not surprised. How many people make a judgment a priori because they feel, always feel in some sense, why would someone say this if it wasn't right, if it wasn't true? And yet there are many examples of people throughout your history of your research that show that exactly the opposite is the case. It's not malicious intent. It's just the way our mind works. And we have to be aware of that. I think as we think about who, especially in times of, you know, where people are easily accused on and condemned on the internet or anywhere else or in the legal profession as you've, as you've worked out. Let me ask you one last question because recently, I wonder about this.

And depending upon when we broadcast this, it'll be a recent, but Joe Biden, who loves to hug people, has been in the news. And I'm wondering, do you think it's possible that people can have had an experience with Joe Biden that wasn't uncomfortable, but then learn that

when other people are uncomfortable and they reflect upon it, they remember that they were uncomfortable if they weren't? Do you think that kind of thing can happen or not? Definitely. There's a, well,

going back to the earlier cases that we were talking about where these women, or going into therapy and with maybe depression or something coming out, believing their parents molested them in satanic rituals. Or some of it is, well, maybe not the satanic ritual stuff, but a little bit more pallid and experience. It's something ambiguous happens.

This is according to the trauma myth book, Susan Clancy's book, that, was that I reviewed for Science Magazine or the Wall Street Journal or someplace I forget where now. But in any event, that there is a reinterpretation in today's light, maybe that ambiguous thing that, you know, made me seemed a little strange. It's now labeled as I'm a victim of sexual abuse, and that's what gets you upset. And who knows with Biden? I mean, I don't know what we are to think when he's presumably, you know, had hugged and kicked. and whatever millions of people in the course of his political career.

And a few are now today in 2018-19 saying, you know, when he did it to me, I was uncomfortable. What are we supposed to do with that? Well, that's maybe a good question to almost leave this with. I think these are difficult questions. But ultimately, I think, for me,

the moral of what I get out of our discussion and your work is that the only way to deal with these difficult questions is to be informed of who we are and what we are as human beings. And that's why I've so applaud your life's work because that effort to inform us of what the real world is, whether we like it or not. And that's the whole point I've always said as a scientist. The world is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

We need to understand that if we are at a better deal, deal with the drama, challenge, good and bad of being a human being. And I want to thank you for helping all of us, hopefully, the better lives. So thank you very much. You said it so well. I'm going to plagiarize you. Okay, absolutely. Anytime. Okay, thanks again. It's really been a pleasure. Take care. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, Gus and Luke Holwerta, and Rob Zeps. Audio by Thomas Amison, edited by Evan Diamond, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects,

and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.