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Whatsapp Professor Loftus' work explored how to test the idea of repressed memories.

Should we trust verdicts based solely on memories? Not according to one expert, who says eyewitness testimony is the major cause of wrongful convictions in the USA, as Damien Carrick writes.

When an eyewitness gives evidence in a trial, how much faith should we place in their testimony? At first brush the answer would seem to be, why not trust them? After all, if an impartial witness says with certainly they saw something—why be sceptical?

However, Elizabeth Loftus, a renowned professor of both law and psychology based at the University of California's Irvine campus, urges caution. Professor Loftus has been at the forefront of complex and controversial debates around the nature of memory for many years, and her research has made her a much sought-after expert witness in both criminal and civil trials. In fact, she has testified in over 250 trials.

Professor Loftus says eyewitness testimony is the major cause of wrongful convictions in the USA. In one project where more than 300 cases of wrongful conviction were established using DNA testing, the major cause of these wrongful convictions was faulty eyewitness testimony.

[Repressed memories] are one of the great mental health scandals of the 20th century...when people have been abused in childhood, their problem is not that they can't remember but that they can't forget.

Since the 1970s Professor Loftus has been conducting experiments around the nature of memory. Her early research involved showing videos of car accidents. She would then ask people a series of questions.

‘For example, we asked "How fast were the cars going when they hit each other",' she says.

'And we asked other witnesses a similar question but with a different verb, "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?". We found that our witnesses told us the cars were going faster if we use the word "smashed" than if we used the word "hit".'

She also found that if you came back a week later and said to these witnesses, 'By the way, did you see any broken glass?', then those originally exposed to the 'smashed' question were far more likely to say they'd seen broken glass.

Professor Loftus is perhaps most famous for her work in cases involving repressed memories. The first case she was involved in centred around George Franklin. His daughter claimed she witnessed her father kill her best friend when she was eight years old and then repressed the memory for 20 years. There was no other corroborating evidence.

Professor Loftus was contacted by the defence lawyer and began researching repressed memories.

‘I was shocked,' she says.

'There was no credible scientific support for this. And despite that, George Franklin was convicted of murder. He served five years in prison before his conviction was overturned.

'I was kind of shocked, as were his attorneys, that a jury would be willing to convict based on this kind of claim. I didn't think we would see too many more of these cases, but what we began to see is thousands of people now coming forward and saying they repressed not memory for murder but repressed memory for years of sexual brutalisation, sometimes claims of being forced into satanic rituals and forced into baby breeding, all supposedly repressed into the unconscious. There is no credible scientific support for the idea that memory works like this, and yet we saw hundreds and hundreds of cases based on these claims.’

Professor Loftus began to think about how to test the idea of repressed memories. She had a light bulb moment as she was driving past a shopping mall.

‘What kind of a false memory could we plant in experimental subjects to study this phenomenon? We have to worry about the ethics review panels that review our proposed research. They're not going to let me convince people that Daddy raped them for a bunch of years and committed murders, so I needed an analogue. And the idea did come to me one day driving past a shopping centre; how about trying to convince people that they were lost in a shopping mall when they were five or six years old, that they were frightened, crying, ultimately rescued and reunited with the family? And that's the false memory we decided to try to plant in people's minds.’

With the cooperation of their families, 24 people were presented with four detailed events from their childhood, three of them were true, and the fourth scenario was fabricated. And when presented with these four scenarios, one-quarter of the participants claimed that they could remember this false event. And then several of those seven went on to add their own details to this fabricated memory.

The study caused quite a stir. ‘The critics hated this result, they could see where I was going and I was heading in the direction of talking about suggestive psychotherapy and that maybe it was leading these patients to have these rich false memories. And so they criticised the study, they said, getting lost is so common, I mean, at least show us you can plant a false memory for something that would be more unusual or bizarre or traumatic than getting lost even for an extended time at the age of five.'

The memory wars: testing the vagaries of human testimony Listen to The Law Report to find out more about the work of Elizabeth Loftus questioning the use of repressed memories in courtroom settings.

Others followed in Professor Loftus’ footsteps, conducting experiments that planted more unusual and bizarre memories. A Tennessee study planted a false memory of nearly drowning and being rescued by a lifeguard; a Canadian study found that people believed they had been the victim of a vicious animal attack and an Italian study showed you could get people to believe they'd witnessed people being demonically possessed.

Loftus describes repressed memories as ‘one of the great mental health scandals of the 20th century'.

'We saw thousands of lawsuits, all that money, all that waste, all that pain. When people have been abused in childhood, their problem is not that they can't remember, but that they can't forget.’

Professor Loftus says that while the ‘memory wars’ no longer attract the attention they once did, repressed memory testimony continues to be advanced in court rooms and she continues to be called as an expert witness.

Much of her current research focuses on exploring what kinds of people are more susceptible to memory contamination, and conversely who is more resistant. She has found that people who self-report lapses in memory and attention and have trouble remembering are more susceptible to memory contamination. People who are highly cooperative also tend to be misled easier with suggestive information.

Professor Loftus says this work is not yet complete, but could one day help cast greater light on how our memories work, or don’t work.

Find out more at The Law Report.

