THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYfilm Minority Report, in which the authorities arrest people in anticipa-
tion of crimes they have yet to commit.
There is another complication, which is that among those children
with conduct problems who are destined to live a life of crime, there
are in fact two further subgroups. The majority, as we’ve heard, show
exaggerated emotional reactivity. There’s also a minority who show
callousness, for example displaying cruelty to animals, and a lack of
emotion. They seem to be psychopaths in the making and don’t respond
to the threat of punishment. However, the situation is not completely
hopeless, because there is some evidence that the behaviour of these
children can be improved through interventions that focus on reward
rather than punishment.
Eyewitness memory
As well as the profound question of why some people turn to crime and
how to stop this from happening, psychologists are also involved in several
more specific, practical lines of research. Perhaps the most influential of
these relates to the unreliability of eyewitness memory. The pioneer in this
field is Elizabeth Loftus. She’s shown, for example, that even the way that
witnesses are questioned can affect their memory of an incident. Asked
to estimate the speed that two cars were going when they “smashed” into
each other, people will typically provide a faster estimate than if you asked
them how fast the cars were going when they “hit” each other.
Loftus has also shown how easy it is to implant “false” memories
in people’s minds. In one of her most famous studies, she created in
participants an entirely fabricated memory for a time when, as a child,
they’d supposedly become lost in a shopping mall. The participants were
presented with information about their past, provided by their friends
and relatives, with the shopping-mall incident mixed in among truthful
accounts of other events. For each event, the participants were asked to
provide as many extra details as they could. Two weeks later, Loftus again
asked the participants about the shopping-mall incident, by which time
many of them said that they could recall the (entirely fictitious) event – in
fact many of them embellished the story with fabricated details.
In subsequent variations of this seminal work, Loftus and her
colleagues have successfully implanted false memories of all manner
of wild and exotic incidents, from drowning to being licked by Pluto
the dog at Disneyland. When sceptical critics continued to argue that
perhaps these incidents really had occurred, Loftus and her team came up