with the perfect riposte, implanting
in participants the false childhood
memory of having met Bugs Bunny
at Disneyland – a truly impossible
occurrence given that Bugs is a
Warner Bros character.
The notion of false memories has
proven to be controversial because of
the claims made by some therapists
that they are able to help clients
recover long-suppressed memories
of child abuse. Loftus’s research
shows how cautious we need to be
when judging the veracity of these
accounts. It would be all too easy
for a therapist to implant memo-
ries of abuse through the power of
suggestion, even without intending
to do so. Indeed, a 2007 study by Elke
Geraerts at the Erasmus University
of Rotterdam found that memories
of child abuse recovered during
therapy were dramatically less likely
to be corroborated by third parties,
or other evidence, than were memories of abuse recovered outside of
therapy, or abuse memories that had never been forgotten. The American
Psychological Association’s consensus statement on this issue is that:
“most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part
of what happened to them, although they may not fully understand or
disclose it”.
According to surveys conducted by Svein Magnussen at the Univer-
sity of Oslo, there continues to be a large gap between lay beliefs about
memory and the facts established by psychology research. For example,
Magnussen has found that a significant portion of judges and jurors erro-
neously believe that children are better at remembering than adults; that
memory starts to decline from the age of forty (the reality is that episodic
memory doesn’t start to decline until approximately the age of sixty); and
that a person’s confidence and the details they give are signs of accu-
racy. A majority of people also fail to realize that most forgetting occurs
immediately after an event, and think that memories for dramatic events
Elizabeth Loftus’s research on the
reliability of memory has led her to
testify or act as consultant for some
of the world’s most high-profile court
cases, including the trial of Michael
Jackson and the Bosnian war trials at
The Hague. Currently Distinguished
Professor at the University of
California, Irvine, Loftus has received
death threats as well as prestigious
awards for her work.