Filmmakers rarely make blockbusters out of the lives of scholars. That said, the first director who decides to make a film about the life and times of Elizabeth Loftus won’t have to do very much to keep viewers’ attention and build the suspense. Her biography is a ready-made script, full of dramatic plot twists, a riveting struggle of good against evil, honor against dishonor, and truth against lies. I am convinced that sooner or later we will see the history of this exceptional life on the big screen. I arrived at this belief in the course of reading pages and pages of biographical material, interviews and recollections prior to my conversation with Loftus. But the events that make her life’s history an attractive film subject are, to the person who experienced them, obstacles that absorb a tremendous amount of energy to overcome. Only a very few can successfully manage them, and fewer still rise above them while remaining faithful to ideals. Among these few, we may invariably find Elizabeth Loftus.
Beth Fishman, the girl who would become Elizabeth Loftus, early on in her childhood was put to the test in a way that would break many. When she was 6, a babysitter molested her. When Beth was 14, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. The obituary called it an accident, but Beth’s father suspected suicide. Two years after she lost her mother, Beth lost her home. A brush fire destroyed her house together with over 400 other homes in broader neighborhood. Despite these difficult experiences in 1966, and despite being raised to expect little more from life than being a wife and mother, she entered Stanford’s graduate program in mathematical psychology. She was the only woman admitted to the program that year, and her classmates wagered among themselves whether she would graduate.
But she did and she started her research focused on the organization of semantic information in long-term memory. But that what she was doing was not something she wanted to devote her life to. She decided to seek out research fields of greater social relevance and begin a new line of research into how memory works in real-world settings, beginning the empirical study of eyewitness testimony. Soon she developed the misinformation effect paradigm, which demonstrated that the memories of eyewitnesses are altered after being exposed to incorrect information about an event—through leading questions or other forms of post-event information; and that memory is highly malleable and open to suggestion. The misinformation effect became one of the most influential and widely known effects in psychology, and Loftus’ early work on misinformation generated hundreds of follow-up studies.
Loftus, however, was not only interested in laboratory work. She was curious about how her discoveries applied to real-life situations, in real court cases, to real witnesses. So she asked for permission to observe courtroom trials. One of them led her to write an article titled “Reconstructing Memory: The Incredible Eyewitness,” which was published in the popular science magazine Psychology Today (Loftus 1974). To her surprise, this seemingly insignificant piece led to a flood of phone calls from lawyers requesting her help with their cases. This was the start of a new chapter in her life, which led to her participation as a memory expert in over 250 hearings and trials. She consulted or testified in dozens of famous cases: Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menendez brothers, the Oklahoma City bombing, and many more.
After Loftus had become a bit bored with the routine of the standard eyewitness cases, she was asked, in 1990, to participate in the unusual case of George Franklin, who stood accused of murder; but the only evidence against him was provided by his daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, who claimed that she had initially repressed the memory of him raping and murdering her childhood friend, Susan Nason, 20 years earlier, and had only recently recovered it while undergoing therapy. Loftus took an interest in the case because while she gave evidence about the malleability of memory, she had to concede that the research on memory distortion involved changing memories for small details of an event. This was somewhat different from the particular kind of memory Franklin-Lipsker was claiming to have, namely witnessing a rape and murder, and enduring years of other traumas that had supposedly been repressed. Could these huge memories be planted? Loftus was not aware that participation in this case would not only radically change her research, but would also turn her entire private life upside-down.
Admitting that she did not know whether it was possible to implant false memories for entire events that had never taken place, Loftus began work to find out whether some of these recovered memories might in fact be false memories, created by the suggestive techniques used by some therapists at the time. After many attempts, she developed together with her students Jim Coan and Jacqueline Pickrell the “lost in the mall” technique. The method involves attempting to implant a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall as a child and testing whether discussing a false event could produce a “memory” of an event that never happened. In her initial study, Loftus found that 25% of subjects came to develop a “memory,” for the event which had never actually taken place (Loftus 1999). She would later call these “rich false memories.” She thus proved something novel and powerful about the malleability of memory.
This was the beginning of the memory wars. Even before the article describing the “lost in the mall” study made it to press, it was met with the intense criticism of supporters of repressed memory therapy (Loftus 1999), whose interests she directly threatened. For Loftus, this was the beginning of an exceptionally difficult period of hate mail, death threats, public attacks, and ostracism, which we spoke about during our interview. But the worst was yet to come. In 1997, David Corwin and his colleague Erna Olafson published a case study of “Jane Doe” (real name Nicole Taus), which was, in their opinion, an apparently bona fide case of an accurate, recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse. Skeptical, Loftus and her colleague Melvin Guyer decided to investigate further. Using public records and interviewing people connected to Taus, they uncovered information Corwin had not included in his original article—information that they thought strongly suggested Taus’ memory of abuse was probably false. While Loftus and Guyer were conducting their investigation, Taus contacted the University of Washington and accused Loftus of breaching her privacy. In response, the university confiscated Loftus’ files and put her under investigation for 21 months, forbidding her to share her findings in the meantime. It took Loftus two hard years to win a letter of exoneration and another six years to get rid of Jane’s subsequent lawsuit, which went all the way to the California Supreme Court. In their report on Jane Doe, published in the Skeptical Inquirer in 2002, Loftus and Guyer affirmed their duty to uncover “the whole truth” and presented the results of their investigation (Loftus and Guyer 2002a, b).
Although eventually exonerated of any wrongdoing, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Loftus. She could not forgive the University of Washington for the manner in which they had handled the most difficult case she had ever encountered. She moved to the University of California, Irvine.
Today, Loftus is most interested in what some term “memory engineering.” Is it possible to insert false memories that can bring positive effects? This is the main question she is seeking the answers to, and much as in the case of most other questions she has taken on, her efforts are proving effective. For example, her more recent research demonstrated that we can convince people of their having been averse to certain foods in their childhood, and they will begin to avoid those foods if we implant the memory well enough. While this example may seem a bit frivolous, the fact that false memories can modify our present behaviors is another of Loftus’ fundamental discoveries, which creates limitless possibilities for developing new therapeutic approaches. Apart from the possibilities that her present research is developing, there are also numerous ethical questions.
Professor Loftus, most lay people imagine that a psychologist’s work consists mainly in examining people using tests and questionnaires, conversing with them, and interpreting their responses. Yet there was a time in your professional life when you were accompanied at lectures by plainclothes bodyguards, and you yourself learned how to shoot. When I talk about this, people wonder what, exactly, a psychologist had to do to fear for her life in public places.
The trouble that I faced started after I began questioning some of the practices of some psychotherapists. What was happening was that people were going into therapy with one problem—maybe they were depressed, maybe they had an eating disorder—and they were coming out of this therapy with another problem, a different problem. Horrible childhood memories of horrible abuse, allegedly perpetrated upon them by their parents or other relatives, or former neighbors. And when I began to investigate these cases, it appeared as if it was some of these psychological practices that were leading people to develop false memories. And when I began to write about this, it made a lot of people mad. It made some of the therapists mad. It made some of the patients who thought they’d recovered these memories mad. It made some lawyers, who wanted to sue on behalf of these accusing patients, mad. For a while, there were these threats. Now things have died down a little bit but the problem is not over.
How long did this period of hatred last?
I first started learning about these cases around 1990, and then I co-authored a book called The Myth of Repressed Memory about this problem in 1994. I had already published a big article in American Psychologist in 1993, so probably that article and that book brought me to the attention of many of the people who would be angry about these ideas. So, throughout the 90s this was a problem. What happened in the mid and late 90s is that people who once thought they had recovered repressed memories of horrible abuse began to realize their memories were false, and they then sued their former therapists for planting false memories. And that generated the tide of change, because millions of dollars were then paid out to patients who had been led down this horrible path.
And has this period definitely concluded now?
No, there are still cases of this. Things are a little bit different now—for example, the clergy abuse cases. You have some genuine victims of abuse by priests and other religious figures. There’s nothing really fishy about the memories, they aren’t claiming they repressed them, but when they go public, it brings hundreds of other people, not all of whom were abused. But some of them claim to have recovered repressed memories, and they try to use the initial accusers as corroboration for their own story. So, there are still problems out there. And there are still families that are getting destroyed by these kinds of dubious accusations.
Of course, there is no justification for the manifestations of hatred towards you by people whose interests you threatened, but we can try to understand them or rationalize their behavior. However, you also had similar experiences at the hands of scientists—people that we’re trained to think hold the truth up as one of the highest values. Why did these people in particular attack you?
Their social and political beliefs and opinions were just so strong that they wanted to ignore the science. They couldn’t help themselves, and that’s how sometimes you would see scientists get into this controversy and insist that the experiments that I and others did weren’t relevant, or that we were ignoring important data. Every now and then they would say things like “science isn’t the only way to know things.”
During that worst period, did you ever think about walking away from it all?
I don’t think so. One of the worst things that happened was when one of these individuals, whom we’ll call Jane Doe, came to believe that her mother had sexually abused her when she was a child. I believe this was because of the suggestive things she was put through. She filed a lawsuit that we had to defend against for many years. This went on until 2009, in fact, but finally that case was resolved.
Was that the most difficult moment for you?
Actually, before Jane Doe sued me and my co-author and the magazine, she had complained to my former university that I was looking into her life and she was upset. My former university then began an investigation of me, and that was a bad period, because I had no idea how it would end up. Potentially my job was in jeopardy, but eventually after a couple of years of investigation I was exonerated of any wrongdoing and could get back to my work.
In past interviews, when speaking about yourself you have emphasized how important those moments in life were when you realized that you wanted to do research of greater social relevance. It’s fair to say that not only did you choose a research field of greater social relevance, but that you also touched a nerve. How many researchers-psychologists think like you do and choose a similar path?
When I went from doing very theoretical memory work and began to study the memory of witnesses to crimes, accidents and other legally important events, that was in the early 1970s. Not very many people were doing that kind of work. While most other memory scientists were doing very theoretical work with very simple stimuli, I started showing people films of accidents and crimes, and studying the memory of these much more complex events. Today, lots of people do that kind of work.
Are those who prefer to remain in the world of abstract relations discouraged from engaging real issues by the potential consequences they might experience?
It’s possible that some are. But it’s also the case that for a long time within the field of psychology, if you did very theoretical kind, abstract work, that was held in higher regard than if you did work that had obvious practical applications. Today I think people and many of the funding agencies do want you to think about how this will fix some mental health or social problem. Maybe it discourages some people from tackling sensitive topics like child abuse.
When discussing research with greater social relevance, we hit on another important problem that is afflicting contemporary psychology. I mean the shift from direct observation of behavior, widely regarded as an advancement in the development of scientific methodology, to introspection. This was demonstrated aptly in a 2007 article by Baumeister and collaborators, and recently this year was confirmed by Polish scientist (Doliński 2018). What are your views on the issue?
I consider myself a cognitive psychologist. Sometimes I am referred to as a social psychologist, but actually I’m a cognitive psychologist, I was trained in cognitive psychology, my academic heroes are cognitive psychologists, the journals I typically read are cognitive psychology journals as opposed to the social psychology journals. So, in my field, the field of memory, we are looking at behavior. In the experiments I do, there is typically some ground truth. There was an event, and then you can look at the behavior and ask how concordant and accurate people are when they try to remember those events. So, we’re looking at behavior all the time. Maybe in social psychology, where there’s more focus on attitudes or some other issues, there is much more self-report going on. But we know that self-report can be contaminated because people want to paint themselves in a good light and they might exaggerate their experiences and responses to look better. So you do want to look at behavior. Maybe some combination of self-report and behavioral studies is the right combination to teach us about the world.
The shift from behavior to introspection is not the only one trouble our field is undergoing. Recent revelations of scholarly fraud, the absence of representativity in psychological studies, and problems with replicating the results of numerous experiments have led people to speak openly of a crisis in psychology as a science. Yet many scientists deny this is the case. What is your opinion—are we really in the midst of a crisis, and if we are, what are its root causes?
It’s certainly useful to ask the question of whether there are publication pressures: are the journals wanting to publish something that is brand-new and seems exciting, maybe even counterintuitive, but into which maybe not enough work has gone into? So, yes, every now and then some study gets published and a phenomenon gets reported, and then it turns out it’s tough or not possible to replicate. But I also think that science corrects itself. People will eventually figure out when something isn’t replicating, and they’ll communicate that. I have seen some poor attempts at replication, where someone calls out the original study when their replication wasn’t even a good effort to replicate, and they impugn the integrity of the original investigator. I don’t think that’s very good for morale and good will. We can do better in terms of being sure that our findings are likely to replicate, but we already had some ways in which we could accomplish that before we had all these scientific police officers roaming the streets.
Could you explain, what do you exactly mean while talking about scientific police officers?
There are individuals who are scrutinizing the work of scientists. Some of them have great intentions, and want to correct some long standing practices that were possibly contributing to flimsy phenomena being published. Criticizing people for using more liberal statistical tests than they should have could be seen as constructive criticism. But some of these scrutinizers are act more like hostile bullies and attack practices that are not so clearly wrong. Or they implicitly accuse an investigator of fraud, when the “mistake” was a much more innocent one.
Do you think that we as scientists should do something to overcome crisis in psychology? And if so, what are the most urgent tasks that psychologists are faced with today?
Some things are being suggested, like reporting a pre-registered hypothesis in advance, and stating in advance how many subjects you plan to run. One of the prescriptions that I don’t like is the idea that you cannot peek at your data. It’s so tempting when an experiment is underway and you’re curious. You want to know how it’s going, and you don’t want to wait for three months to get the answer when you’re halfway there—so you can get a hint, while you’re excited and interested. It’s still tempting to want to peek, but I think as long as you tell people what you’ve done and are open about it, there are some steps toward fixing the problem. If there is a problem.
Could we say a consequence of all these methodological problems is a decline in trust towards our field? What are your views on the matter?
I don’t know. When you get publicity about supposedly one hundred studies while only 40 replicated and the other 60 did not, people will wonder about psychology and about social psychology in particular, because those seem to be the ones that people have been trying to replicate. But when you really look into the replications were not always a fair attempt.
Low replicability of research is not the only one reason of the decrease in trust in our field. From time to time, psychologists engage in ethically questionable activities just as they did at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when psychologists affiliated with the APA were involved in work on techniques for interrogations to be applied as part of the war on terror. This is not the first time that people from our discipline took active part in researching and developing methods used against other people. We can recall the example of the CIA-inspired MKUltra program. Looking at it from a certain perspective, this is also research “of greater social relevance,” but tremendously different from what you do. How do you judge the participation of psychologists in perfecting torture techniques, which is probably a fair phrase to use in referring to these “interrogation methods”?
My co-authors and I recently published a study showing that sleep deprivation leads people to be much more likely to confess to a wrongdoing that they did not do when compared to people who were not sleep deprived. I think this is an important study because it tells us a little something about sleep deprivation, which is one of the ingredients in torture methods. And I think it’s our skills as psychologists and our methods that allow us to learn something about at least this one element. It’s an important contribution to science, and I think it says something about the policy, namely, that this is a policy that might not produce very good outcome. So, I certainly see a role for psychologists in doing work that will educate us about the effects of these torture elements and their outcomes.
But this is a little different story, because you are talking about neutral results which can be used in a good way or in a bad way.
Yes.
I mean the case of the psychologists who were employed by the CIA and were actively researching and looking for better methods of interrogation. They worked out methods which were not useful in gathering better information, but which caused much pain for the interrogated people.
I’m not a member of the American Psychological Association, but apparently that organization has rules against psychologists participating in efforts to figure out how to torture people better. So, I think you need to ask somebody who is more of a clinician and who is a part of the American Psychological Association community.
After these reflections on the condition of contemporary psychology, let’s return to your history for a moment. I read a statement in which you said that at the beginning of your career you were fascinated by the approach of B.F. Skinner. Could you say a little more about this?
Yes, I was an undergraduate student at UCLA. And when I was at UCLA, I began taking courses in psychology. Even though I was majoring in mathematics, I ended up taking so many elective courses in psychology that I finished with degrees in both mathematics and psychology. During my studies in psychology at UCLA I learned about Skinner. It was the idea of patterns and reinforcement and the elegance of his work that excited me. Being given a rat and being involved in trying to train this rat to press a lever. Ultimately, after I received my Ph.D., I actually had a chance to meet Skinner and had a number of lunches with him.
How do you remember him?
I was spending a year at Harvard, and I sent a letter to Skinner—this was, of course, way before the internet and email. I wrote that I was an experimental psychologist and that I had held my Ph.D. for five years, and I was at Harvard for a year. I said, “nothing would give me greater pleasure than to have lunch with you once this year.” And the next thing that happened is my office phone rang, and he called me and said “Hi, it’s Fred Skinner.” And I was shocked! We had lunch, and he talked the whole time about the second volume of his multivolume autobiography. At the time he was working on this volume that covered from age 9 to 20, the early years of his life. He was telling me about his writing and he didn’t really ask me very much about me, but at the end of the lunch he said “You’re such a fascinating conversationalist, would you like to have lunch again?” So, we began a series of lunches at which I would get to listen to his ideas, and I mostly just listened because he didn’t ask very many questions of me.
Wasn’t this inspiring?
Well, after a while, when somebody doesn’t turn to you and say “Tell me about you,” it’s not that much fun.
Aha. During your decades of research, have there been other psychologists who had a similarly strong influence on you?
Certainly. When I was in graduate school at Stanford, I was doing work on Computer Assisted Instruction, and I took a course with a psychology professor named Jonathan Freedman. He was wanting to do some studies on memory, and he asked me if I wanted to join him and participate in those studies. That was how I began to study memory—the theoretical, semantic memory, not the kind of eye-witness memory that I would ultimately do later. So, he’s certainly responsible for getting me interested in memory as a topic and teaching me how to be an experimental psychologist: how to design a study and produce the materials, run the subjects, analyze the data, and write the manuscript. I owe a lot to him.
Who would you name as a model to follow for young people just getting their careers off the ground?
One piece of advice I’ve often given to people who are thinking about going to graduate school is that if they think they can, and if they think they want an academic career, they should look up the productivity. And certainly find somebody who’s working on a topic they’re interested in, but you want people who are publishing with students, because students will need those publications to secure an academic job. So, I think that’s important. Once you start your academic job, hopefully you have an idea of who you are and what kind of studies you want to do. Again, it is important to publish early in one’s career, because the tenure decision is going to be based on that. At least that’s some advice for people who aspire to a career in academia.
I think we can say without an ounce of exaggeration that you proved to the world that memory does not function like an audio cassette or film reel we can simply rewind to the desired moment and start watching, that memory can also include events which never actually took place, that much can be erased from it, and what’s left behind is often incomplete and inaccurate. Your discoveries have helped many people. At the end of the 1990s, you left behind the study of distortions of memory in favor of a sort of memory engineering—the implantation of memories in order to achieve specific effects. Was this decision the result of your belief that the problems that inspired your research had been solved?
There was a period where I was with my then post-doc, Daniel Bernstein, and my two then-graduate students who had come with me to the University of California when I moved here. We took an interest in the repercussions of having a false memory. If I plant a false memory in you, this will affect your later thoughts, or your later intentions, or even your later behavior. We talked a lot about finding a way to study that, and finally we decided that what we would try to do is to plant a false memory of getting sick eating a particular food. When we succeeded in planting that false memory, we found that people weren’t that interested in eating those foods after they had developed the false belief or memory. So, if you convince someone that they got sick as a child eating strawberry ice cream, they’re not as interested in having strawberry ice cream. And this was our first clue that you could plant these memories and it could affect behavior that occurred often a bit later. So, we did a lot of studies of that sort, trying to expand our knowledge of false memories and their applications.
Do you have any concerns about ethical issues that can arise out of your studies on what some term memory engineering?
Oh yes, certainly, when I talk about this I do. Because we know how to plant false memories and we know it can affect people’s behavior—it can make them less interested in eating fattening food, more interested in eating healthy food, less interested in the particular alcohol they drink—it does raise the question of whether we can ever affirmatively use these techniques on people, maybe to allow them to live a happier or healthier life, or should we ban their use. People sometimes cringe at the idea that other people out there might want to plant false memories in them and affect what happens in the course of their lives, but I also suggest that, for example, if you could plant a false memory that would make people avoid a fattening food that would make them less likely to become overweight or obese, less likely to develop diabetes, less likely to develop heart trouble, less likely to have a short lifespan, then maybe they would be better off. And there are some times when there’s some kind of a trade-off between truth and happiness.
Your experiments and publications are among the highest-rated in terms of citations and in lists of popular studies, and you have received multiple awards. What I am most interested in (and I hope our readers are too) is this question: which of your discoveries you feel are the most important in the development of science, and why?
I don’t think that you can really point to one article or one scientific study. It’s not like an author can say “here’s my book ‘War and Peace,’ this is my great contribution.” The thing I’m most proud of is the body of work that has revealed so much about the malleable nature of memory, about the fact that it’s not just a recording device, but that it’s a constructive process. And that it does probably contain bits and pieces of fiction mixed in with facts. I think what’s important is the body of scientific work that reveals this truth about memory.
Readers interested in psychology can read quite a lot about your previous accomplishments, but the majority of us are undoubtedly interested in the issues you are presently engaging. What questions are you trying to find answers to these days?
In the last couple of years we have become interested in something we call “memory blindness.” In these memory blindness studies you have somebody who gives you a report about a memory they have. They tell you, for example, that a thief who stole a wallet was wearing a green jacket, and some time later you come back to them and you feed them information about their earlier response, but it’s wrong. You tell them, for example, that they had said the jacket the thief wore was brown, then ask if they remember what brand that jacket was. So, we’re now telling them they gave us a response that was different from the one they previously gave. Do people even detect it? Often, they don’t, and especially when they don’t detect it they will often succumb to the suggestive influence, distorting their memory in the direction of that mistaken information. So, this is leading us to all kinds of questions: when do people detect that something is wrong? When do they notice? How and when can they tell you or alert you if they noticed that they’ve detected that something is wrong? What surprises us is that people often don’t detect. And then they’re influenced. So, a number of the graduate students in my lab have been doing studies of what we call “memory blindness.” This is just one example.
What are other issues we have not talked about yet but you would like to mention to our readers? Such as a message about contemporary psychology, a big issue or important question about psychology?
One other thing in our field we’re interested in is how your personal biases, either your political biases or your social biases, can make you more susceptible to receiving misleading information that is consistent with those biases. And there are number of recent studies we’re involved in which demonstrate that, indeed, people are more inclined to accept suggestive information when it fits with what they already feel.
Do you think this is a problem which is strictly connected with recent political changes and issues with our contemporary political life where everybody has access to social media, or this is a more universal problem?
This is a universal problem, but it also applies to the political context. People’s political beliefs set them up to be especially susceptible to being contaminated with false information that fits with those beliefs. This is something that’s now being increasingly documented, but what we end up doing about it is something the next generation of psychologists will have to figure out. But I think it doesn’t bode well for the problem of fake news, because it’s been shown that even when you have a sense that it’s fake, you can still be influenced by it.
Professor Loftus, I believe that your life is a ready-made script for a feature film that I hope I’ll get to watch some day. In thanking you for our conversation, I would also like to express my wish that no more sudden plot twists get thrown into the script of your life.