Elizabeth Loftus Quotes
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When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. The process of calling it into conscious awareness can change it, and now you're storing something that's different. We all do this, for example, by inadvertently adopting a story we've heard.
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Some who question the authenticity of the memories of abuse do so in part because of the intensity and sincerity of the accused persons who deny the abuse . . . the current denials of those accused of sexual abuse are not proof that the allegations are false. Research with known rapists, pedophiles, and incest offenders has illustrated that they often exhibit a cognitive distortion –a tendency to justify, minimize, or rationalize their behavior (Gudjonsson, 1992). Because accused persons are motivated to verbally and even mentally deny an abusive past, simple denials cannot constitute cogent evidence that the victim’s memories are not authentic.
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Most of the time, perhaps 99 percent of the time, the defendant is guilty; his screams are the final protest of a human being about to lost his most precious possession, his freedom.
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The thought had occurred to me as I was flying to Salt Lake City earlier that day that Ted Bundy might offer to let me stay in his apartment.
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Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one.
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When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction.
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Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, .. False memories have these characteristics too.
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Women involved in out-patient treatment for substance abuse were interviewed to examine their recollections of childhood sexual abuse. Overall, 54% of the 105 women reported a history of childhood sexual abuse. Of these, the majority (81 %) remembered all or part of the abuse their whole lives; 19% reported they forgot the abuse for a period of time, and later the memory returned. Women who remembered the abuse their whole lives reported a clearer memory, with a more detailed picture. They also reported greater intensity of feelings at the time the abuse happened.
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In court the next morning I sat at a table in the judge’s chambers. On the other side of the table, close enough for me to reach across and touch him, sat Ted Bundy. He’s adorable, I thought, surprised at my first impression, because I’d pictured him in my mind as brooding, dark, intense disdain.
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According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in “crude psychiatric analysis,” guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and “incestuous opinion citing,” these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making “therapeutic lifers” out of their patients and ripping families apart.
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We all have memories that are malleable and susceptible to being contaminated or supplemented in some way.
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Many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.
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If we make people believe that before the age of 16 they got sick drinking vodka, they don't want to drink as much vodka.
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To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything.
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My work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don't have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory.
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We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories.
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In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened.
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Zealous conviction is a dangerous substitute for an open mind.
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Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.
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You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.