Book Reading #29 - Opening Skinner's Box



Book Author: Lauren Slater  

Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall

Summary
Lauren Slater relates the story of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus' work has mainly dealt with memory recall, and the idea that memories can be implanted into a person's mind. Slater talks about Loftus' experiments in which she would show movies and then ask subjects questions by suggesting the possibility of an occurrence An example would be asking a person ""Did you recall that man had a beard?". And often the person would agree when in fact it was false.

One event that has shaped Loftus' work is her testimony in the 1990 George Franklin case in which a father was accused by his daughter of murdering her friend twenty years later. Loftus was convinced the daughter could not possibly recall such events twenty years later so vividly. However the jury did not believe her and the man was found guilty. This lead to her publishing in 1993 her findings on the "Lost in the mall" experiments in which she found that 25% of her subjects would recount false events  after they had been implanted into their minds. 25% to her mind, was enough to validate her theory.

Loftus' next focus has been on the idea of repressed memory. This is the idea that someone can completely forget a trauma, store in their  "RAM", and then call it back up on cue years later. She has received criticism from other researchers who believe repressed memory is possible. 

 

 

Discussion

This chapter was interesting and poses important questions about the validity of people's testimonies in court.

When is  a person telling the truth or not. At the end of this chapter I felt the same way as Slater. I agree that something must have happened in Loftus' life that makes her obsessed  with defending people who are wrongly accused. She also has an aversion for  recalled memory.