Can our memories be manipulated?
There is a theory that exists known as the reconstructive memory theory, which states that memory is not a passive process that we have known and recognized it to be, memory is not simply something that is placed in the long term memories store and recalled like a button on a tape recorder. Loftus states in an interview on the Ted Radio Hour that “Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.” Memory is a very active process and every time we recall it, our memory reconstructs itself. The theory of reconstructive memory states that there are two types of information, the first being the information that we obtained during the perception of the event and the second being the post-event information in the form of leading questions. Leading questions are a type of question in the law system that suggests a particular answer or contains information that the examiner is looking to have confirmed. An example of a leading question would be if a suspect was home on the night of the murder, the question already has the assumption built in that the murder took place and the examiner wants the suspect to confirm whether or not he was home when the murder took place. Leading questions are incredibly important in memory because over time post-event information (leading questions ) and the original information obtained during the perception of the event integrate together until it is not possible to tell them apart. This integration leads to an actual alteration of the original memory. When people feed you misleading information in the form of questions this can contaminate and pollute your memory.
Elizabeth Loftus is an American cognitive psychologist who is an expert on human memory, she has studied the whole mechanism of memory for decades. She doesn’t study forgetting things or mental illnesses that cause you to lose your memory she studies how people remember and how they can remember things that never happened. Loftus had her own experience of false memories and her own memories being manipulated when she attended the 90th birthday of one of her uncles. When Loftus was 14 years old her mother drowned in a swimming pool and when she had a conversation with one of her relatives at the party they told her that she was the one that had found her mothers body when she was so sure she hadn’t, she racked her brain knowing that she had no memory of discovering her mother’s body when her relative kept insisting. This relative was so insistent and sure that it was her that Loftus began to return to when she was 14 years old, visualizing herself discovering her mother's drowned body, beginning to think that it actually happened. That she had forgotten that she was the one that found her mother’s body that day, then Loftus received a phone call from her relative apologizing, saying that it was never her that found her mother it was someone else. Loftus realized just how malleable memory is, like a piece of clay. The leading question here was her relative telling her that it was her that found her mother and it began to integrate with her original perception of the event. Only when her relative called to tell her they had gotten it wrong was she able to separate the two.
Elizabeth Loftus is one of the most influential cognitive psychologists, she revolutionized the way that we now handle court cases and eyewitness testimonies. Before evidence that a suspect was guilty was predicated completely on the memory of the victim, her experiment showed that human memory can be manipulated easily and cannot be trusted or relied upon when condemning someone to prison for the rest of their life for something that they did not
do. In a podcast interview on Ted Radio Hour, Loftus claims that “In one project in the United States, information has been gathered on 300 innocent people - 300 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn't do. They spent 10, 20, 30 years in prison for these crimes. And now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent. And when those cases have been analyzed, three-quarters of them are due to faulty memory, faulty eyewitness memory.” Showing the implications of an altered memory and how it can lead to hundreds of innocent people being convicted wrongly.
Loftus worked on legal cases involving eyewitness testimonies and one of them that comes to mind is showing how easily memory can be controlled and how dangerous this is in this court case involving a rapist. That particular evening a female hitchhiker had been raped, Titus and his fiance who was the love of his life were in a similar car that the rapist had, Titus also fit the profile of a rapist. A policeman stopped Titus and his fiance in the car on the side of the road took a picture of Titus and placed it in a lineup of other men that fit the profile in front of the victim, and the victim pointed to Titus saying that he was the closest to the suspect. When it came time for court, Titus stood on the stand pleading for his innocence but the victim rose up and said that she was positive that it was him. Titus was then taken away and locked in prison, only when Titus contacted an investigator that found the correct man, a man who lived in the neighborhood and had raped over 50 victims and the information was given to the judge as he then released. The problem at hand here was how did the victim's response to Titus go from thinking he bears the closest resemblance to her captor to being very positive that it was him? Loftus never discovered why exactly but this built the foundation for her theory or reconstructive memory and the wrongly convicted Titus was the catalyst for her to find out how and why memory is so easily controlled. If you are interested in more of Loftus’s influential work her experiments are in the article below.
Experiments of Elizabeth Loftus on reconstructive memory
Loftus conducted her own experiments in a lab, the most famous one is known as Loftus and Palmer done in 1974, one that I am currently studying in psychology class. The whole lab experiment was split into two experiments, the participants in the first experiment were university students in Loftus’s psychology class participating in this experiment to fulfill their course requirements.
Participants were shown recordings of traffic accidents
Then they were given a questionnaire with a number of questions about the accident they had just witnessed
Only one of these questions was critical for the research “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”
The 5 groups in experiment 1 only differed in the emotional intensity of the verb used in that sentence:
Emotional intensity of the verb
Smashed
Collided
Bumped
Hit
Contacted
The misleading post-event information was the verb and the emotional intensity of it, it was thought that verbs with more violent connotations to it would result in the participants stating that the cars were going faster than if they had verbs with a lower emotional intensity such as “hit”. Loftus was right because here are the results:
Verb ;Speed estimate (mph)
Smashed ;40.5
Collided ;39.3
Bumped ;38.1
Hit ;34.0
Contacted ;31.8
The higher the emotional intensity of the verb, the higher the speed estimate.
Experiment 1 clearly demonstrated that misleading post-event information influences eyewitness accounts of the event However there could be two possible explanations for this finding
There could be a genuine memory change (the leading question causes a change in the participant's representation of the event)
There could be response bias (memory of the event does not change, but verbs of a higher emotional intensity cause participants to give higher estimates when they are uncertain)
Experiment 2 was conducted to rule out the second explanation for the conflicting findings of experiment 1, to ensure that participants actually had a genuine memory alteration and it was not just response bias. The procedure was as follows:
Participants were shown a film of a car accident
After the film, they were given a questionnaire
3 groups of participants got 3 different versions of the leading question
A week later participants were given another questionnaire that consisted of 10 questions and included one critical yes/no question
“Did you see any broken glass” (there was never any broken glass in the film)
The results were as follows:
Verb (varies in emotional intensity) ; % of participants saying “yes” to the question about broken glass
Smashed ; 32%
Hit ; 14%
No critical question (control group) ; 12%
Experiment 2 was conducted to rule out that the cause of alteration to the eyewitness's perception of the original event was because of response bias; since it demonstrated that verbs of higher intensity may cause people to recall events that never occurred, researchers concluded that we should reject the latter explanation.
In conclusion, this is one of the many studies that Loftus has done in order to test her theory of reconstructive memory, this is an incredibly interesting topic as it shows how flawed our own memories can be something so intrinsically private to us can be controlled and manipulated by others.
By Ashley Chan
Works cited
Radio hour, T. (2017). Elizabeth Loftus: How Can Our Memories Be Manipulated?. Retrieved 21 February 2022, from https://www.npr.org/transcripts/557424726
Popov, A. (2018). Psychology for the IB diploma (2nd ed., pp. 29-56). Oxford university press.