Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

Chapter 8, entitled “Lost in the Mall: The False Memory Experiment,” explores the research of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, a University of Washington professor who has researched memory, and specifically the way memories can be distorted, since the 1970s and 1980s. Loftus has testified in court on numerous occasions, brought in by defense attorneys to discredit the memories of witnesses that detract from their case. Loftus has participated in the high profile trials of the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, and Ted Bundy. Years of research has showed how memories are “contaminated by the subtlest suggestion” (182). In the 1990s, when “recovered memory therapy” was coming to the fore, Loftus bucked the cultural trend and argued that repression is not always a believable phenomenon.

Around the same time, Loftus participated in a widely publicized trial, in which a daughter had accused her father of murdering her best friend nearly two decades prior, which she discovered via the recovery of a repressed memory. The father’s defense attorneys employed Loftus to discredit the daughter’s memory:

In one of the most publicized recovered memory cases of the decade, Loftus stood before the court and told of a mind that blends facts with fiction as a part of its normal course; she told how her subjects in the lab made red signs yellow, put barns in places where they never were, recalled black beards on bald chins (184).