Finally finished reading this fascinating 8 part series on Slate about an experimental psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus work on tampering memories and the implications (good and bad) of her work. The whole thing has surreal feel to it and it's like reading a science fiction novel. I cannot even begin to explain how precarious our memories are. If you have time, please read the whole series - it's worth every minute (or first watch her talk on Fora TV below). Few of bizarre points from the series:
1. What happened when doctored photo of President Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was shown to some participants?
The fake images were effective. Through random distribution, each fabricated scene was viewed by a subsample of more than 1,000 people. For Obama meeting Ahmadinejad, the number who remembered seeing it was 26 percent.
2. Implications of unreliable and fallible memory on eyewitness testimony:
Men were going to jail based on contaminated eyewitness testimony. Families were being ruined by charges of incestuous abuse drawn from memories concocted in therapy.
Loftus set out to prove that such memories could have been planted. To do so, she had to replicate the process. She had to make people remember, as sincerely and convincingly as any sworn witness, things that had never happened. And she succeeded. Her experiments shattered the legal system's credulity. Thanks to her ingenuity and persistence, the witch hunts of the recovered-memory era subsided.
But the experiments didn't stop. Loftus and her collaborators had become experts at planting memories. Couldn't they do something good with that power? So they began to practice deception for real. With a simple autobiographical tweak—altering people's recollections of childhood eating experiences—they embarked on a new project: making the world healthier and happier.
3.Framing effect on Memory:
As an experimental psychologist, she decided to answer the question by studying her own behavior. What did she talk about when the topic was hers to choose? What did she like to bring up at parties? The answer was crime. She loved books, movies, TV shows, and news stories about it. Maybe she could become a crime expert. She could use the science of memory to help the justice system.
The first step was to find a project somebody would pay for. The Department of Transportation was offering money to study car accidents. Accidents weren't crimes, but they involved eyewitnesses, so she started there. She showed people films of collisions and quizzed them about what they had seen. Sometimes she asked how fast the cars had been going when they "hit" or "contacted" each other. Sometimes she asked how fast they had been going when they "smashed" into each other. The "smashed" question produced estimates 7 miles per hour faster than the "hit" question and 9 miles per hour faster than the "contacted" question. The questions were skewing the answers.
4. In her book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, she described her next thought:"While I couldn't prove that a particular memory emerging from therapy was false, perhaps I could step around to the other side of the problem.
Through careful experimental design and controlled studies, perhaps I could provide a theoretical framework for the creation of false memories, showing that it is possible to create an entire memory for a traumatic event that never happened."
5. Starting in 1997, they collaborated on several articles about advertising's power to alter memories. They called this power insidious, warned that people should be educated about it, and stipulated that they didn't support intentional editing of consumers' pasts. But they also highlighted the "managerial opportunities" it presented.he researchers showed these ads to a group of college students, while other students saw a non-Disney ad instead. To ensure that the Disney ads wouldn't trigger true memories of shaking Mickey's hand, the researchers screened out students who reported up front that they had met a TV character at a theme park.Of the students who were shown an ad featuring happy memories of meeting Mickey, 90 percent later reported increased confidence that this event had happened or might have happened to them. That was twice the percentage who reported such an increase in the control group. And compared with the control group, those who saw the Disney ad were significantly more likely to say that they fondly remembered visiting the park and that such visits had been central to their childhoods. Many who saw a different version featuring Bugs Bunny were convinced that they had met him at Disneyland, even though this was impossible, since he was a Warner Bros. character. This was a pivotal decision. Loftus wasn't a detective. She was a designer of experiments. She couldn't start with seemingly recovered memories and demonstrate that they were false. But she could start with false memories and demonstrate how they were seemingly recovered.
6. Why should we cling tightly to those memories that disturb us and spoil our lives? Life might become so much more pleasant if it is not marred by our memory of past ills, sufferings, and grievances. … We seem to have been purposely constructed with a mechanism for erasing the tape of our memory, or at least bending the memory tape, so that we can live and function without being haunted by the past. Accurate memory, in some instances, would simply get in the way.The doctor, as Loftus initially conceived it, was just a metaphor. And that was how she presented it in her introduction. But by the end of the book, she was taking it literally. She proposed "to put the malleable memory to work in ways that can serve us well.
7. In February 2005, Loftus and her coauthors published the egg study, concluding that "humans can be trained to avoid food." Four months later, they published the ice-cream study under the title, "False Beliefs About Fattening Foods Can Have Healthy Consequences." The diet-improvement rationale, originally an afterthought, was now central. The bottom line, they wrote, was that "we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve health."In the food experiments, all the threads of Loftus' career came together. Instead of training a rat, she was training people. Instead of using a reward, she was using the techniques she had learned from the recovered-memory therapists. And instead of planting bad memories, she was planting healthy ones. She was a real-life memory doctor.
8. Rosy memories plagued food research, too. A typical survey, Loftus and her coauthors noted, might ask, "How often have you eaten chicken in the last 12 months?" Again, self-flattering answers—people reporting that they had eaten more spinach or less chocolate than was really the case—could skew medical histories, distort the prevalence of risk factors, and lead public-health programs astray. They could also contaminate science. "Suppose, for example, that you are a researcher interested in the relationship between fat in the diet and the development of breast cancer," Loftus wrote. "You decide to interview a group of women who have developed breast cancer and a group that is cancer free, asking questions about their diets and eating habits." Some of these women "might exaggerate the amount of healthy foods they ingested and minimize the quantity of unhealthy, fatty foods that also made up part of their diet." As a result, "you would be led to the wrong conclusions."
9.While musing about the hypothetical memory doctor in 1980, I could not have known that a version of the memory specialist was in the making. These "repressed memory therapists" would go out and prospect for early childhood memories of trauma, and in the process they inadvertently created false memories of the most unimaginable kind. The memory doctors I had speculated about in 1980 were supposed to use their talents to help people. The memory doctors of the 1990s went in the wrong direction. But the memory doctors of the 1990s were trying to help people. They just didn't see that they were going in the wrong direction. That's the danger of doctoring memories: The future is as cloudy as the past.
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