Dan Simon, a 2022-23 CASBS fellow and USC law professor, joins in conversation with Elizabeth Loftus, a 1978-79 CASBS fellow and Distinguished Professor at UC Irvine. Loftus is known in the public sphere through her decades-long study of memory – specifically, its malleability and fallibility – as well as her application of findings as an expert witness or consultant in hundreds of legal cases. Loftus's book "Eyewitness Testimony," completed at the Center, charted the course of her career that followed and serves as this episode's launching point.
Dan Simon, a 2022-23 CASBS fellow and USC law professor, joins in conversation with Elizabeth Loftus, a 1978-79 CASBS fellow and Distinguished Professor at UC Irvine. Loftus is known in the public sphere through her decades-long study of memory – specifically, its malleability and fallibility – as well as her application of findings as an expert witness or consultant in hundreds of legal cases. Loftus's book "Eyewitness Testimony," completed at the Center, charted the course of her career that followed and serves as this episode's launching point.
ELIZABETH LOFTUS
UC Irvine faculty page
Wikipedia page
TED Talk (2013), "How reliable is your memory?"
Nobel Prize Summit (2023), "The misinformation effect"
The New Yorker (2021), "How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory"
DAN SIMON
USC Gould School of Law faculty page
CASBS bio
"In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process" (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012)
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences(CASBS)at Stanford University
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Follow the CASBS webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
In this episode of Human Centered, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus is a distinguished professor at UC Irvine, with faculty appointments in the Departments of Psychological Science, Criminology, Law and Society, and the School of Law. She's published more than 20 books and 600 scientific articles.
She's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She has served as president of the Association for Psychological Science, the Western Psychological Association, and the American Psychology Law Society. She's received eight honorary doctorates and is the winner of a very long list of awards.
A couple of the recent ones include the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, and the Lifetime Career Award from the International Union of Psychological Science. Throughout her career spanning more than half a century, Loftus has penetrated the public consciousness through her study of human memory, specifically its malleability and fallibility. It was during her 78-79 CASBS fellowship that Loftus completed Eyewitness Testimony, a groundbreaking book which charted not just the course of her scholarship, but the more public aspects of her career.
And, is it the impetus for today's conversation? Loftus is no stranger to controversy. She's been called upon as an expert witness or consultant in hundreds of court cases.
Some of the more well-known cases include the McMartin Preschool Molestation Case, the Hillside Strangler, the Abscam Cases, the trial of the officers accused in the Rodney King beating, the Menendez Brothers, the Bosnian War Trials in The Hague, the Oklahoma City bombing case, and litigation involving Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, Oliver North, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and the Duke University lacrosse players. In conversation with Loftus today is 2022-23 CASBS fellow Dan Simon, the Richard L and Maria B. Crutcher Professor of Law and Psychology at USC's Gould School of Law.
In his work, he examines criminal processes through the lens of experimental psychology. Dan's book In Doubt, The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process, received the 2015 Book Award from the American Psychology Law Society. As you're about to hear, Simon engages Loftus on a number of topics, including the experiments and phenomena related to memory malleability that informed eyewitness testimony and subsequent research, the battlefield of the so-called memory wars in which Loftus has been a high-profile participant, Loftus' view on the replication crisis engulfing experimental psychology, the current state of the art of memory science and where she would like to see research go, and what she refers to as a new tension in the culture in the age of MeToo.
Let's listen in.
Dan Simon: This is a unique honor and pleasure for me to actually host Beth Loftus here for the CASBS podcast. I am a current fellow and I got the honor to interview a former fellow who also is a role model, an idol, an inspiration, and I'm also happy to say a friend. So thank you Beth for being here.
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, my pleasure.
Dan Simon: So I'm going to start actually with the reference to CASBS because you filled out an evaluation form when you completed your year here, which was a while back, and with your permission, which I believe is granted, let me just point out some of the things in your evaluation, okay? This is your report of what did I do at school today, teacher. So you basically finished a book or wrote a book, Eyewitness Testimony, and I'll try to get back to that book in a bit later, which you completed already in January, and between January and May, you wrote three quarters of a second book.
You wrote nine articles, you revised two articles, you revised two book chapters, you wrote a book review, a few editorials, you quote seriously audited three courses, and maybe we'll get back to the word seriously, as if you do anything un-seriously. You started on a few collaborations, you ran a few grants, you participated in three seminars actively here at Stanford, you attended all the Wednesday night seminars, and the list goes on. You also made friends, you also took up jogging, and that's probably what my whole cohort has done cumulatively.
So what's the secret? Where does this come from? Just share the magic, please.
Elizabeth Loftus: I'm not sure. I mean, one of the things that I thought I would do, Dan, because it's something I hadn't done yet, is develop some big theory of memory. And something where you might write it up in a psych review paper. And at the end of the year, I was feeling like I never did that. That was one of my original plans. And I remember having a conversation with another psychologist, Barbara Tversky is her name. And she said, you know, you don't have to come up with some big theory. You're really good at phenomena. I mean, why don't you just stick with phenomena? Because that's kind of your strength. And in a way, that was a lovely conversation for me to have, because it made me feel that even if I didn't do what I went there thinking I would do, maybe I never needed to do that. I could do other things. And in fact, I took advantage of the opportunities that came up at the center that never would have happened had I not been there.
Dan Simon: But when we look at the mass of work, the body of work you've left behind, and I'm going with the characterization of phenomena, there is a much bigger meta-statement there, isn't there?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, I mean, of course, one of the things that I did do is to write my first book on or finish the first book on eyewitness testimony, which then became the center of my research effort and scholarship. And out of that grew many experiments, many phenomena that I would then pursue in the succeeding years.
Dan Simon: Right. But I'm pushing you here to take a bit more credit or get closer to your original CASBS goal. Because if I were asked to characterize your body of work, I would say that it is replete with phenomena of quality and breadth like no one else's.
But there is also a big statement there about memory. And maybe it's not the one you sought consciously to make as you went about these dozens and hundreds of studies that you've published. But wouldn't the idea be of just, you know, the malleability of memory, the constructiveness of memory, the fallibility of memory? You know, isn't that something that you would kind of characterize as sort of as a big statement, a kind of, I would say, psych review on steroids kind of statement?
Elizabeth Loftus: Yes, that is, that's the core of my, in some sense, my contribution, my interest, the malleability of memory, that memory is not something that you record and then you play it back later, like a tape recorder, that it's much more constructive and it's readily contaminated both by ourselves and by others. But back when I was at the Center, I mean, I was in my 30s and I was, you know, one of the youngest fellows who was there during my year at the Center. And, you know, I had no idea where that malleability idea would go.
And yet I knew, having come out of the Stanford PhD program in psychology, that a lot of fellow graduate students were developing these complicated mathematical models of memory. And I think maybe that's where I got the idea that I was supposed to do something like that, which I never did. And I'm not sorry that I didn't.
Dan Simon: Nor are we, your readers. Thank you. As someone who's been working in the field and following your work, I think you've revolutionized the field. Personally, I am not the same person as I was with respect to memory when before I read your work. And I think that's true for the whole field, right? I think the field almost took on the intuitive lay understanding of, oh, memory is a kind of a monolithic, discreet thing that we have and we keep and we use and we can restore it and everything is going to be fine, right? And then you've basically disrupted that. I'm using a word from Silicon Valley because that's where I'm speaking from. You disrupted the market.
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, I mean, it's true that this general concept and the misinformation effect, which is just the phenomenon that you can get your memory contaminated by misleading information to which you're exposed, is now in most kind of introductory level psychology books or certainly books on memory or cognitive psychology. So I do think it caught on and I'm very proud of that.
Dan Simon: To say the least, yes, you should be. In fact, I was actually speaking a few years back to editors at Harvard University Press and we were going back and forth about a particular book project. And one thing that came up quite often was, can you write a book like Eyewitness Testimony? Something not subject matter. They said, just that's the format. That's what I think was one of their very best selling books ever and they just loved it and they kept pushing.
And actually that kind of format, that ease with which you wrote it and the readability and the access and the breadth just was a winner. I don't know how many copies have been sold since, but I'll just tell you that that's kind of a daunting obstacle for future authors because nobody can rewrite anything anything like Eyewitness Testimony.
Elizabeth Loftus: Yeah, for something that came out in 1979, I mean there you go, it's still selling. Go figure.
Dan Simon: Right, yeah, absolutely. So part of your work took place on the battlefield of the memory wars, right? How do you look back at that period both as the science of it, but also maybe personally as a warrior in that battle?
Elizabeth Loftus: So, well, I had been doing experiments on misinformation, the misinformation effect, the malleability of memory for quite a while, at least 15 years or so, when I was first approached by an attorney who was defending a man accused of murder. He was defending a man named George Franklin, who was accused of killing a little eight-year-old girl some 20 years earlier. And the only evidence against him was the claim of his now adult daughter, who said she witnessed the murder and repressed her memory, and now the memory was back.
I consulted on that case for Franklin's attorney. Franklin was convicted based on this claim of repressed memory, becoming maybe the first American citizen to be convicted of murder based on nothing other than a claim of repressed memory. And I just found this so puzzling.
And I was looking into the literature to see what is the evidence that this phenomenon even happens and found no credible scientific support. But after the Franklin case, there were just zillions of other cases of people claiming they repressed their memories primarily for sexual trauma. And now their memory was back and they started suing their parents or their other relatives, their former neighbors, what have you. And there were just thousands and thousands of these cases.
And yet the work on the malleability of memory, which showed you could change the detail here and there about an event, hadn't really shown you could plant an entire event into people's memories. And so that's what I set out to explore next and devised a new paradigm for planting what we now call rich false memories, these whole memories for things that didn't happen. It was a very contentious time because there were people who were making the accusations.
There were people who were denying the accusations and defending against them. There were scholars or scientists or lay people on both sides of this controversy that were basically screaming at each other. And it was not a pleasant time to be in the trenches in the memory wars.
Dan Simon: Were the memory wars perhaps a cautionary tale for what is since transpired and is yet to come? And that is that politics writ large, including social forces and so on, pushes back against science to reach particular results. So, you know, I see parallels between memory wars and let's say the battle over climate change and the battle over, you know, vaccinations and so on. So, were you perhaps a kind of a canary in the mind for this new era that we're living in?
Elizabeth Loftus: What I used to hear back in the 90s at the height of these memory wars, when the scientists were often arguing against clinicians, the mental health professionals who were treating these patients and helping to produce these allegedly recalcitrant trauma memories, some of them would say science isn't the only way to know things. And so, yes, there was an element of kind of anti-scientific thought or disrespect for science, lack of appreciation of science or what have you.
Dan Simon: And sounds like it's a recurring theme in our lives, isn't it? So if I can go back for a moment to the legal domain, which kind of got you started, I believe, and which you've impacted so much, there is this distinction that you've made yourself, right, between the malleability of a particular fact, a particular piece of an episode as opposed to constructing a whole memory, right, from scratch. And I understand why the latter is of great importance in the kind of cases that, over which you fought the memory wars, right, the cases of either civil or criminal proceedings that were based on a supposed recovered memory.
But I still want to, and that's a huge point that you've been making both as a political and legal matter and also as a basic psychological matter. Still, I would like to draw us back for a moment to the more sort of discrete, limited, small sort of facts in an episode. And maybe you can sort of give us a better sense of how can small bits actually turn out to be big deals in criminal cases, right? In what way do these little factoids actually, they can swing a case perhaps, right?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, there are a number of ways that misinformation about a detail about an event that somebody actually did experience can be crucial. I mean, one obvious way is that one of the things that people in court often testify about is who the perpetrator was. And if your recollection of who the perpetrator of the robbery or the shooting or whatever the crime is, if your recollection of the perpetrator is contaminated, which it can be by things that happen after the event is over, then the wrong person can be identified as having perpetrated the crime and an innocent person can be convicted.
And we know from some databases like the Innocence Project in New York, which has compiled information on over 350 wrongful convictions, people who spent 5 or 10 or 15 or more years in prison for crimes that we now know they didn't do because DNA testing showed that they were actually innocent. The major cause of those wrongful convictions is faulty memory. Somebody was led to believe that they saw a person who wasn't the right person.
And so an innocent person goes to prison. It not only affects them and their extended family and circle of friends, but that means the real perpetrator is still out on the street, possibly committing more crimes. So that's just one example of why memory for a detail can be crucial. It can be crucial when it's other kinds of details. What was the color of the getaway car? That's just another example of something that's not about the person, but is something that could be crucial for solving the crime.
Dan Simon: Right. So in addition to the possibility of the fact, let's say in this case, the color of the getaway car being suggested by, let's say, a detective who has got an intuition about who the perpetrator is and what is the color of their car. And in that case, it will be a case of suggested memory, right? That's the classic work that you've done.
But I'm also interested in the possibility of the witness actually generating a fact, which might or not be known by the detective spontaneously, but falsely, right?
Elizabeth Loftus: Yes, that happens. We call that auto suggestion. People can draw inferences about what might have happened or what could have happened when they're pressed for details by an investigator to some legally important event, or even by a therapist who presses them for more details about some event that's being discussed in a therapy session. These individuals can generate misinformation and it can start to feel for them like it's a real memory.
Dan Simon: And that can be problematic, right? Because it provides them with a richness of detail, which then thereafter makes them sound more credible to a third party, like a jury, right?
Elizabeth Loftus: Yes, yes. And one of the things we showed explicitly is that when people tell you something and they have a lot of detail in their story, it enhances its credibility. It makes it more persuasive to a trier of fact. And if that is being generated by, let's say, the interviewing process or the interaction between a witness and somebody they're talking to, it can be a problem for an innocent person.
Dan Simon: Right. In fact, I happen to remember a particular example of this. I think it's the Gary study with the hot air balloon. I'll just give a word of background for our listeners. This is a study of Beth's former students who follow up on her paradigm of implanting false memories. In that case, participants are led to believe that as a child, they flew in a hot air balloon, which as verified in advance, never was the case.
The beauty and the power of the study is that a good quarter and sometimes a third of participants will actually come to acknowledge and endorse a memory or supposed memory of an untrue event after a mere three sessions of suggestion in the lab, right?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, the innovation in that Gary and her collaborators, it was done with doctored photographs. So you just doctor a photograph, put your subject, when they were a little kid, in a photo with their parent, plop it into a hot air balloon ride, show it to the adult subject, and that's enough to get people to start to remember and then elaborate on this hot air balloon ride that they never actually took.
Dan Simon: Going back to those details in the false memory, which I find intriguing, particularly the ones that participants suggest spontaneously. So you've planted, you've done the heavy duty, the heavy work, you've planted a memory, and now they're being asked about it and they come up with stuff that you did not plant, which makes it sound more credible but is obviously false. So just for one example, one that stuck out to me, in that hot air balloon study, participants were asked, tell us about the experience.
And they will tell things like, I remember my father was kind of ridiculing me for not wanting to come, so I went, you know, I succumbed. So these are things that clearly we know didn't happen because the whole memory is false, but they also weren't suggested. So this is embellishing and it's obviously a wrong fact and it's done spontaneously.
And I'll give you even another one that even I find even more strongly. One participant then said, I remember the wind blowing in my face. Okay, which sounds innocuous, but as it turns out, hot air balloons float in the body of air, which means there's no wind that's experienced in the balloon. So that is not just a false memory. It is also physically impossible. So if there's, to any extent, you can imagine, let's say, a legal case subsequently, where that fact actually makes a difference.
So here you're actually getting witnesses making up stuff, not just reporting a memory that was implanted in them, but actually adding, embellishing facts, which were not real, but also untrue. And can actually, if wind was an issue, or the behavior of the father ridiculing the kid was an issue, then actually what you've got is that these, that's already a third order falsity of the memory that can actually swing a case.
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, I love that example because sometimes people who criticize this line of work on rich false memories have suggested that maybe the event really happened. And what your suggestive intervention did was revive a true memory rather than plant a false one. Maybe the person really was lost in the shopping mall in this particular way and the parent was just unaware of it.
Or maybe they really were attacked by an animal and the parent was unaware of it and you helped revive a true memory. But what you're suggesting here is that, in this example, is that what gets produced in response to the manipulation, even if something like that had happened, parts of it are impossible and could not have happened, which was the whole motivation for us doing the study where we planted a false memory that on a childhood trip to Disney, you met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny. We did that study and we got lots of people to fall for the suggestion and believe they met Bugs Bunny at Disney and give us a bunch of detail about the meeting, but it's impossible because Bugs is a Warner Brothers character and wouldn't be at a Disney resort.
I've often used the Bugs study and others like that, that attempted to plan impossible events to counter this criticism that all we're doing is reviving a true memory. You've actually given me another way to respond to that. That, you know, even if the core of the memory was true, they've invented impossible details.
Dan Simon: One of the things that I've heard you say, and I think is actually very important, is that we currently have no method to determine the truthfulness of a memory outside of external corroboration. I'm assuming that is still the case, and I was wondering if you have any thoughts of, if we were to go that route, where would we look and what might it look like? Or are we just giving up on that?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, yes, you're absolutely right. People have thought that maybe, you know, the emotional reaction or arousal to a false memory might be less than to a true memory of a traumatic experience. Several studies now show that people can be just as emotional about their false memories.
There have been a lot of studies where people have tried to look at the neural signals, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or some kind of measuring of neural signals to see if there's any indication of a true versus a false memory. That doesn't look very promising. There does continue to be work on that today.
I have a couple of collaborations with a group of researchers in China who've been looking at neuroimaging and maybe finding slightly different patterns in the hippocampus when people are recounting something that's true versus false. But we're just a long, long way away, I think, from being able to use this to do what the legal system needs to do, wants to do, which is, here's a memory, tell me whether it's true or false.
Dan Simon: And I think it's fair to say also that to the extent that cross-examination is a useful tool of evincing the truth in the courtroom, it might work against or in the vein of catching liars, but it probably won't do much good to distinguish between people who genuinely hold memories though, and to distinguish between the true and the false ones.
Elizabeth Loftus: Exactly. I think the neuroimaging people have found a little more success and optimism about telling a deliberate lie from when that same person is telling something truthful. But the problem with these false memories is people believe them. And even sometimes something starts as a lie, but it turns into that person's truth.
Dan Simon: And when you say people, you mean the people themselves, right? We're not just talking about third parties here.
Elizabeth Loftus: Yes, the person themselves starts to really believe it. And that's going to look different in the brain than a deliberate lie.
Dan Simon: And I'm assuming motivation plays a role in this subjective belief in one's false memories, right?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, motivation is important because you're more likely to accept misinformation if it fits with your pre-existing biases, beliefs or interests. And so that's a sense in which motivation kind of fits into this picture.
Dan Simon: Right, and we know, again, back to the legal domain, witnesses oftentimes have a motivational stake in their testimony, right? They're a party to the dispute, they're a victim, a co-felon, and so on and so forth. So very few people testify with a completely neutral motivational slate, right? So you could see how that could sort of sway their testimony, their memories, not just their testimony.
Elizabeth Loftus: Right.
Dan Simon: What do you say to people who push back against the notion that, look, memory mistakes are crucial to the legal process and they can cause lots of havoc and so on? And they say, but you're giving memory short shrift because memory is fantastic. It's probably one of the reasons that human beings have this fairly good cognition, right?
You couldn't even think of it conducting a criminal investigation without memory because there's nobody to interview. And if it's not forensic physical science and there's nothing to talk about, there's nothing to talk about, right? So the point might be, if I just kind of make it a bit pithy, is you people are ragging on memory much more than you should. We should be more grateful to memory and how well it serves us.
Elizabeth Loftus: I agree. I agree that memory, you know, that's how I was able to make the coffee this morning and make my toast and know how to turn on the computer and be able to talk to you on this podcast. I mean, it's crucial.
And it does serve us very well. But I think people don't realize how much fiction is swirling around in our memory banks because we make mistakes and we don't get caught. And so if I tell you I had a hamburger for dinner last night instead of pizza, you just accept my story.
I don't get caught in my mistakes. But when it comes to the legal system where somebody's liberty is at stake, then very precise and accurate memory matters a lot. And that's what I've ended up caring about.
Dan Simon: Right. And I think it would be fair to say that the importance of the memories and what's at stake, as you're saying, make a difference. But also the fact that sort of the null hypothesis that people hold is that memories are true. And so that's the foil, if you like, that memory is kind of perfect in most ways. And that is the kind of notion that infuses our social understandings of one another and also the legal system. And compared to that, you've actually got to be banging away at the point, no, it's not that perfect.
Elizabeth Loftus: I Perfectly put.
Dan Simon: If you look back, were there any interesting sort of research avenues that you hoped to take but ended up not, or they, you know, didn't pan out?
Elizabeth Loftus: I don't think, it's not a research effort that didn't pan out. But one thing I am struggling with right now is many of these ideas and the issues having to do with the malleable nature of memory and the concerns about wrongful convictions and innocent people getting sent to prison for things they didn't do. Some of these same issues are relevant in today's MeToo world.
But coming up against the MeToo world, a lot of people don't want to hear about this. They don't want to hear about wrongful accusations or the possibility of them. They don't want to hear about the fact that somebody might be accused of some things and guilty even of some things, but maybe not everything that they're accused of.
So there's like a new kind of tension in the culture around this new development of greater appreciation of the abuse stories of women and children and men. But there's a little new war going on, and I have not been able to come up with a satisfying way of trying to explain to people that just because you question some memories doesn't mean you're questioning all memories.
Dan Simon: Right. So is this part of the movement to trust victims, particularly we're talking about victims of sexual assault? And correct me if I'm wrong, I kind of see a confluence of two different things. One is the one you mentioned that people who, let's say, have strong prior beliefs in, let's say, supporting Me Too movement, having a hard time accepting that some particular memory of a particular victim might be mistaken in the cognitive sense, right? It's just a false memory. As opposed to lots of other more sociological and bureaucratic institutional barriers that victims, particularly female victims of sexual assault, have faced over the times.
And this is going back decades maybe throughout history, right? So more often than not, and there's evidence to this, that the officer who's actually recording an incident in the first place will tend to dissuade victims of sexual assault from actually pressing charges or pursuing the case. Why?
Maybe because they're misogynistic, maybe because it's a hard case to investigate, their clearance rates are low, they just prefer not to deal with it, so they actually deny reports of sexual assault. And against that phenomenon, there's been this pushback of believe the victim. Because do your job, and here's a credible victim, and you've got to take down the case, and if she's not credible, then investigate, work hard on it.
And so maybe these two forces are happening in parallel.
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, I can certainly appreciate that possibility. And from my perspective, I only see the ones that went forward. I don't see or hear or get consulted on the ones that didn't go forward. So I'm possibly seeing a biased sample of what's out there in the big world.
Dan Simon: So where is your research going these days? What are you looking at?
Elizabeth Loftus: I've been involved in a collaboration of a registered replication of the stop sign, yield sign study where we convinced a lot of people that the car that got in an accident went through a stop sign instead of a yield sign. And you know, the replication crisis in psychology, there are now registered replications going on. I was very happy to see one that was done by a different group of investigators in Ireland on the lost in the mall study, basically a registered replication, essentially finding very similar results to the lost in the mall study where we we planted a complete memory of being lost in a particular way as a young child in a shopping mall.
Dan Simon: Let me go back for a second to the replication crisis, right? What are your thoughts on it? You've got a good meta view of the field. You've seen it over time. How do you feel about it?
Elizabeth Loftus: Sometimes when there's been some big new flashy study that gets published because it's new and big and flashy, I mean, I think people are talking about it. I think it is important to try to replicate it and so on.
At other times, I see people kind of trying to replicate things that aren't going to make a big difference in how we think about the world. The study is not all that important or if this little study does not replicate, it's not going to change in any significant way the way we think about how the mind works, for example. And so it may be that some resources are being wasted on attempted replications of things that aren't going to matter that much.
And there's certainly also the problem that some of these replications are taking place and being done in a way that is very different from the original study. It's not only a different decade, it's a different culture, it's a different part of the world, it's a different time. And so, you know, something cannot replicate, you know, because the world changed or things are different in different cultures. And it doesn't mean that that first study is that there's really something wrong with it.
Dan Simon: Do you think the field is better off with the replication crisis than we were before it popped up?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, I think, you know, I think the field of psychology, you know, lost a fair amount of respect over, you know, publicity over replication difficulties. That wasn't so great for the reputation of our field. But I mean, in the end, if people want to spend some of their time trying to replicate important studies and certainly see if the phenomenon is still true, even if it was, even if it might have once been true, it's worth doing.
Dan Simon: Because you can imagine a replication that, or let's say a failure to replicate and sort of the headline is, you know, scholars busted, right, for doing bad science. Or you could imagine the headline is exactly what you're saying. This phenomenon was like every phenomenon is good for a particular context and time and place and culture and so on and sample and such. And it doesn't necessarily carry that well over all of those domains, which is a fair sort of scientific conclusion to reach and probably helps us understand, you know, the moderating variables and the limits of the phenomenon.
Elizabeth Loftus: Yes.
Dan Simon: Well, I'm super delighted to hear that the Lost in the Mole study replicated as it obviously was destined to do.
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, and the Irish study, the Irish replication, they went further and did, added some wonderful extensions to their study. And this may be a nice way of thinking about attempted replication. If you can take that next step and add something new.
So what the Irish scientists did is to show these Lost in the Mole reports to jurors, to mock jurors and ask, you know, do you believe that this is a real memory? And overwhelmingly, people are impressed with these verbal outputs and believe that the memories are real when they're listening to them. So that was a nice extension of this replication and a new contribution to the field.
Dan Simon: How do you view, if you look back, take a, you know, maybe till memory research has been around for a hundred plus years, I believe. How would you characterize it just as a scientific discipline? How successful has it been? How impactful has it been? What is the future of it portend?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, I mean, I can't speak to all of it because memory is so important to people and to life and in so many different domains. And somebody else could tell you about the importance of memory and the science of memory in the world of education and how people learn and remember material that they acquire through the educational process. I mean, I have focused on the legal system and the memories of witnesses who end up in trials because they saw an accident or they saw a crime or they think that they have a memory for a crime or some other event.
And there, there's just been enormous influence of memory science in terms of affecting the policies and practices of police, law enforcement, investigators and so on. So, I mean, we think it's been a big success story to now have police agencies doing things that were studied by psychologists, published in the psychological literature, communicated to law enforcement, and are now being implemented. And, you know, I'm thinking, for example, of the ways in which police conduct lineups or photo lineups and exactly how they do them and what instructions do they give and what kind of fillers of foils go into the line up and who conducts the line up.
Does the person know who the suspect is? I mean, these are things that psychologists have been studying for a long time and are having an impact.
Dan Simon: Where would you like to see memory research going? Is there any, like, big picture thing that you would just love, things that haven't been cracked yet and you think that would help push the ball forward?
Elizabeth Loftus: Well, I'm not sure how big a picture this is, but I have been thinking about this point, about the personal memories and misinformation and contamination versus our semantic memory or fact memory contamination. The kind of things that we worry about when we worry about misinformation being spread about climate change or being spread about, you know, certain health, COVID treatments, that these two subworlds have been doing research on these two slightly different types of misinformation and how we might protect ourselves, that they need to be talking a little bit more to each other and learning a little bit more about what the other group has discovered. And maybe together can make more of a dent in the world of social media misinformation and reducing its damaging effects.
Dan Simon: Let me take you back to your evaluation from your year in CASBS. And one of the points you make, I'm quoting, I no longer believe that there is an intellectual decline with advancing age. Now, you wrote that as a pretty young woman. Is it fair to say that that still holds with you being Exhibit A?
Elizabeth Loftus: I mean, there I was at the center with all these really brilliant, wonderful people spending the year, and most of whom were older and some of them quite a bit older than I was, who were just so sharp and interesting and a delight to be with. I think that's possibly what I meant, but I'm not quite sure because I wrote this such a long time ago.
Dan Simon: Right. So it seems fair to say that you fit that model of CASBS scholars, right, because you two are sharp and interesting and fun to be with. So I just want to thank you for your fantastic research over the years. You've radicalized the field. You've informed a legal system. You've made scholars richer and better and more insightful. And what can I say? Thank you and I hope CASBS had something to do with your development.
Elizabeth Loftus: It was an amazing year. It was absolutely amazing. And I'm looking at the end of thanking for those comments, by the way. But my last line in my evaluation, in sum, this must be what they mean by heaven.
Dan Simon: That kind of sums it up. And that still is the notion here at CASBS some years later. That's exactly what we all feel.
So thank you again so much.
Elizabeth Loftus: Thank you.
Narrator: That was Elizabeth Loftus in conversation with Dan Simon. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBUS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.