Evidence-based justice: Corrupted memory (Nature)
Elizabeth Loftus has spent decades exposing flaws in eyewitness testimony. Her ideas are gaining fresh traction in the US legal system.
[Excerpts:]
…In a career spanning four decades, Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has done more than any other researcher to document the unreliability of memory in experimental settings. And she has used what she has learned to testify as an expert witness in hundreds of criminal cases … informing juries that memories are pliable and that eyewitness accounts are far from perfect recordings of actual events.
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Now, the 68-year-old scientist's research is starting to bring about lasting changes in the legal system. In July last year, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a ruling — based largely on her findings — that jurors should be alerted to the imperfect nature of memory and the fallibility of eyewitness testimony as standard procedure. Loftus is working with judges in other states to make such changes more widespread.
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In 1990, Loftus got a call from a California attorney defending George Franklin, whose daughter claimed that during therapy, she had recovered decades-old memories of him murdering her friend, Susan Nason. Loftus decided to consult for the defence team. “I thought it was pretty fishy and started looking into the literature,” she says. She found little convincing research to support the idea that traumatic memories could be repressed for years.
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The courts went on to see a surge in cases based on recovered childhood memories, fuelled in part by popular books and high-profile accusations. Loftus began to wonder whether it was possible to fabricate complex, believable memories. “I wanted to see if we could implant a rich memory of an entirely made-up event,” she says. An idea eventually came to her as she drove past a shopping mall.
Working with a student, Jacqueline Pickrell, Loftus recruited 24 people and, with the cooperation of family members, presented them with four detailed accounts of events from their childhood. Three of the incidents had actually taken place, but the fourth — a dramatic account of being lost in a mall — was entirely concocted by Loftus and corroborated by the participants' relatives. One-quarter of the participants claimed to remember the false event….
