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What We Believe With All Our Heats Is Not Necessarily The Truth

我们内心一直相信的东西可能不是真的

   Towards the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud claimed that the mind has a way of defending itself against unacceptable or painful thoughts and impulses, by using an unconscious mechanism that he called “repression” to keep them hidden from awareness.
   19世纪末期，弗洛伊德提出大脑会采用一种被称为“压抑”以远离意识的一种无意识机制，来抗拒不愿接受的或者悲伤的想法和冲动。

   Freud later modified his thinking to a more general theory of repressed desires and emotions. However, the idea that the memory of a traumatic event could be repressed and stored beyond conscious recall became accepted by many psychologists.
   随后佛洛依德将自己的思想进行调整为一种压抑渴望和情绪的普世原理。然而，他关于创伤事件的记忆被压抑和保存在意识恢复以外的地方，这种理论被大多数心理学家接受。

Logic Structure

   The rise of various forms of psychotherapy in the 20th century focused attention on repression,and the possibility of retrieving repressed memories became associated with psychoanalysis so strongly that even Hollywood dramas began to explore the link.

   Memory in general was a popular subject among experimental psychologists too, particularly as behaviorism began to wane after World War II,and the “cognitive revolution” was suggesting new models for how the brain processed information into memory. By the time Elizabeth Loftus began her studies, long-term memory in particular was an attractive area for research,and repressed and recovered memory was about to become a hot topic, as a number of high-profile child abuse cases reached the courts in the 1980s.

"Human remembering does not work like a videotape recorder or a movie camera."
                      Elizabeth Loftus

Suggestible memory

   During the course of her research, Loftus grew sceptical about the idea of recovering repressed memories.Previous research by Frederic Bartlett, Gordon Allport, and Leo Postman had already shown that even in the normal working of the human brain, our ability to retrieve information from memory can be unreliable; Loftus believed that this must also be true of the recollection of events that are so traumatic that they are repressed – perhaps even more so, given the emotive nature of the events.

   Loftus began her research into the fallibility of recollection in the early 1970s, with a series of simple experiments designed to test the veracity of eyewitness testimony.Participants were shown film clips of traffic accidents and then asked questions about what they had seen. Loftus found that the phrasing of questions had a significant influence on how people reported events.

   For example, when asked to estimate the speed of the cars involved, the answers varied widely, depending on whether the questioner had used the words “bumped”, “collided”, or “smashed” to describe the collision.They were also asked if there was any broken glass after the accident, and the answers again correlated to the wording of the question of speed.

   In later versions of the experiment, participants were verbally given false information about some details of the accident (such as road signs around the scene), and these appeared as recollections in many of the participants’ reports.

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   In a 1974 experiment, Loftus showed a group of people a film of cars colliding, then asked them how fast the cars “bumped”, “collided”, or “smashed” into each other.Her choice of verb determined their estimate of car speeds.

Legal implications

   It became clear to Loftus that recollection can be distorted by suggestions and leading questions, made after the event in question.Misinformation can be “planted” into the recollection of an observer.The title of her 1979 book describing her experiments, Eyewitness Testimony, shows that Loftus was well aware of the implications of this “misinformation effect”, not only for the psychological theory of memory, but also for the legal process.

   Anticipating the controversy that was to follow, she wrote that “the unreliability of eyewitness identification evidence poses one of the most serious problems in the administration of criminal justice and civil litigation”.

"In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened."
                      Elizabeth Loftus

False memory syndrome

   Loftus was soon to be increasingly involved in forensic psychology, as an expert witness in the spate of child abuse cases of the 1980s. What she realized then was that memories could not only be distorted by subsequent suggestion and incorrect details introduced by misinformation, but may even be totally false.

   Among the many cases in which she was involved, that of George Franklin perfectly illustrates the different aspects of what came to be known as “false memory syndrome”.Franklin was convicted in 1990 for the murder of a child who was best friends with his daughter, Eileen.
Her eyewitness testimony, 20 years after the murder, was crucial to the conviction.

   found numerous discrepancies in Eileen’s evidence, and proved her memories to be incorrect and unreliable in several respects, but the jury nonetheless found Franklin guilty. In 1995, the conviction was overturned because the court had been deprived of “crucial evidence”: the fact that Eileen had “recovered” the memory during hypnotherapy.

   believed that Eileen’s memory of seeing her father commit the murder was sincerely believed, but false, and had evolved because Eileen had witnessed her father commit other cruel actions, and “one brutal image overlapped another”. Loftus successfully argued in court that a combination of suggestion during hypnosis, existing frightening memories, and Eileen’s rage and grief had created a completely false “repressed memory”.

   case of Paul Ingram (which Loftus was not involved in) also pointed towards the possibility of implanting false memories. Arrested in 1988 for sexually abusing his daughters, Ingram initially denied the charges, but after several months of questioning confessed to them along with a number of other cases of rape and even murder.

   A psychologist involved in the case, Richard Ofshe, grew suspicious and suggested to Ingram he was guilty of another sexual offence – but this time, one that was provably fabricated.Ingram again initially denied the allegation, but later made a detailed confession.

Lost in the mall

   The evidence for the implantation of false memories was still anecdotal, however, and far from conclusive; Loftus suffered harsh criticism for what were then considered to be controversial opinions.So she decided to collect irrefutable evidence through an experiment that aimed to deliberately implant false memories.This was her 1995 “Lost in the Mall” experiment.

   Loftus presented each of the participants with four stories from their own childhood that had apparently been remembered and supplied by members of the participant’s family.In fact, only three of the four stories were true; the fourth, about getting lost in a shopping mall, was concocted for the experiment.Plausible details, such as a description of the mall, were worked out in collaboration with the relatives.

   Interviewed about these stories one week later and then again two weeks later, the participants were asked to rate how well they remembered the events in the four stories.At both interviews, 25% of the participants claimed to have some memory of the mall incident.After the experiment, participants were debriefed and told that one of the stories was false – did they know which it was?

   Of the 24 participants, 19 correctly chose the mall as the false memory; but five participants had grown to sincerely believe in a false memory of a mildly traumatic event.

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?"
                      Elizabeth Loftus

   Loftus had provided an insight into how false memories might form in real, everyday settings.For ethical reasons Loftus could not devise an experiment to test whether a truly traumatic false memory (such as child abuse) would be even more vividly recalled and sincerely believed,but she suggested that it would, in the same way that a more disturbing dream is more vividly recalled and even mistaken for reality.

   It was this idea that prompted her to say, “what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth”.However, in 1986, psychologists John Yuille and Judith Cutshall did manage to conduct a study of memory following a traumatic situation.They found that witnesses to an actual incident of gun shooting had remarkably accurate memories, even six months after the event, and resisted attempts by the researchers to distort their memories though misleading questions.

Questionable therapy

   Loftus points out that her findings do not deny that crimes such as abuse may have taken place, nor can she prove that repressed memories do not exist;she merely stresses the unreliability of recovered memory, and insists that courts must seek evidence beyond this.Her work has also called into question the validity of the various methods used to recover memory, including psycho-therapeutic techniques such as regression, dream work, and hypnosis.

   Consequently, it raised the possibility that false memories can be implanted during the therapeutic process by suggestion,and in the 1990s several US patients who claimed they were victims of “false memory syndrome” successfully sued their therapists.Unsurprisingly, this apparent attack on the very idea of repressed memory earned an adverse reaction from some psychotherapists, and split opinion among psychologists working in the field of memory.

   Reaction from the legal world was also divided,but after the hysteria surrounding a series of child abuse scandals in the 1990s had died down, guidelines incorporating Loftus’s theories on the reliability of eyewitness testimony were adopted by many legal systems.Today, Loftus is acknowledged as an authority on the subject of false memory.

   Her theories have become accepted by mainstream psychology and have inspired further research into the fallibility of memory in general, notably by Daniel Schacter in his book The Seven Sins of Memory.Despite the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, Loftus found that jurors tend to give more weight to it than any other form of evidence when reaching a verdict.

MORE TO KNOW…

APPROACH

Memory studies

BEFORE

1896 Sigmund Freud proposes the notion of repressed memory.
1932 Frederic Bartlett claims that memory is subject to elaboration, omission, and distortion in Remembering.
1947 Gordon Allport and Leo Postman conduct experiments that demonstrate various types of non-deliberate misreporting.

AFTER

1988 The self-help book for sexual abuse survivors, The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, is influential in popularizing recovered memory therapy in the 1990s.
2001 In The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter describes the seven different ways in which our memories can malfunction(故障).

ELIZABETH LOFTUS

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   Born Elizabeth Fishman in Los Angeles, USA in 1944, Loftus took her first degree at the University of California with the intention of becoming a high school maths teacher.While at UCLA, however, she started classes in psychology, and in 1970 received a PhD in psychology at Stanford University.It was here that she first became interested in the subject of long-term memory, and met and married fellow psychology student Geoffrey Loftus, whom she later divorced.

   She taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, for 29 years, becoming professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law.
She was appointed distinguished professor at the University of California in 2002, and was the highest-ranked woman in a scientifically quantified ranking of the 20th century’s most important psychologists.

Key works

1979 Eyewitness Testimony
1991 Witness for the Defense (with Katherine Ketcham)
1994 The Myth of Repressed Memory (with Katherine Ketcham)