Illusion: Conversation with Elizabeth Loftus

Many of us have the intuition that we see and hear and remember everything. Does our mind work like a video camera? It definitely doesn't work like a video camera or any kind of recording device. We're not just taking in information and replaying it later. The whole process is much more complex. Actually, memory is reconstructive. We're taking bits and pieces of experience—sometimes things that happened at different times and places—in constructing our memories.

Recollecting. When we recall something, the process is more like one of reconstruction.

Okay. Is that a perfect process? Is it fallible? How does it work?

Well, what happens, when you go through life, you have experiences and you may store bits and pieces of information, but later on other things can happen. People can talk to you. You can tell people about your experiences. You can be fed misinformation about the experience. These activities can change your memory, can transform or distort your memory, so that when you try to call up a memory for a past event, you're reconstructing, and there can be lots of errors.

Okay. But, surely if I'm really confident about my belief or my recollection and it's sincere and really emotional, surely that means it's more likely to be an accurate memory.

Well, it may be slightly more likely to be an accurate memory if you're really confident about it, but confidence is not a good indicator that your memory is accurate because false memories can be expressed with a lot of confidence. They can be expressed with a lot of detail. They can be expressed with a lot of emotion. They have the same characteristics as true memories, and just relying on those characteristics can mislead people into thinking that something is real when it's not.

 Is it possible to implant a false memory, make somebody believe something happened when it never actually happened?

Absolutely. I mean, in my own work, for example, we've changed people's memories for the details of events that they did experience. We've made people, for example, believe that a car went through a stop sign instead of a yield sign, or a guy running from the scene had curly hair instead of straight hair. That's really easy to do. But you can go further with people. You can plant entirely false memories, whole memories, into the minds of people for things that didn't happen.

Wow. So surely that has implications for people testifying in court, like witnesses saying, "Yes, that was the guy that committed the crime," or, "Yes, the car went through the stop sign and hit the other car." Does your research have implications for the courtroom?

Well, it does, because—you know, most of the time little errors that we make in memory don't matter very much. I mean, it doesn't really matter, if I tell you that I had a hamburger for lunch instead of chicken, but when it comes to the legal world, now very precise memory matters, and so memory evidence is precious. It needs to be preserved. It needs to be protected. Unfortunately, a lot of times, it's not, and people or circumstances get there and contaminate those memory traces and lead to travesties of justice.

Wow. Are there any famous cases of false memories?

Oh, gosh. I'm trying to figure out where I would begin. There are certainly a lot of famous politicians who have had distorted memories. One of my favorite ones is Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency of the United States, when she talked about a trip that she had taken to Bosnia. She had a very vivid recollection of landing under sniper fire on this trip. It was supposed to be a greeting ceremony, but instead they just had to run to the base. Later, photographs were revealed of this landing in Bosnia, and it was extremely peaceful. Lots of children there. Hillary's daughter was there. So what's going here? She had a distorted memory, one that resulted in a little bit of embarrassment for her, because people called her Pinocchio, but she made a mistake. I mean, she had a false memory. Her case shows us that all that intelligence, all that experience, all that education, all that Yale Law School degree, doesn't protect you from having false memories. We can all make those mistakes. That's interesting.

 Do we ever repress memories? If there's something bad that's happened in our childhood that we might want to forget on some level, do we ever repress memories, and do they ever come back without our knowledge?

On this whole question of repression, I have to say that what we do do is we sometimes don't think about things for a long time and can be reminded of them. Sometimes unpleasant experiences, we don't think about for a long time and we can be reminded of them. But that is ordinary forgetting and remembering. This notion of repression, that you can take years of brutalization, banish it into the unconscious where it's walled off from the rest of mental life, and then get it there and reliably recover it all—just no credible scientific support this. And yet many people have been prosecuted or sued civilly based on claims of repression and so-called derepression.

Is it possible to tell the difference between a true and a false memory?

We haven't had very much luck doing that. I mean, we've tried looking at emotional ratings. Maybe people are more emotional about their true ratings, but that doesn't make a difference. Maybe you see different brain images if you did put people in an FMRI machine, and you'd see differences between true and false memories, but there are barely any differences. Maybe true memories and false memories would persist differentially. Maybe true memories persist longer, but we don't see any evidence for that.