Episode #227 – Talking About Memory with Dr. Elizabeth Loftus – Part 2

Nationally recognized and renowned memory expert Dr. Elizabeth Loftus joins Steve Wood, Ph.D. for the second part of their discussion about memory, where they talk about repressed memories. Dr. Loftus shares her experience working on cases where repressed memories were at the core of the case and the research she has done on repressed memories and false memories. Steve and Elizabeth discuss the ways in which she has been challenged and attacked for her research and the work she has done around repressed memories. Lastly, they talk about how Dr. Loftus acts as an investigator on the cases she works on.

Full Episode Transcript

[0:17] Steve Welcome to the Litigation Psychology Podcast brought to you by Courtroom Sciences. Dr. Steve Wood back with part two of my discussion with Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. As you recall, Dr. Loftus is a memory expert who has done extensive work on eyewitness memories, um but she’s also done a lot of work on repressed memories. So, as we’re going to fill in part two, we want to talk to her a little bit more about her work with repressed memories. So, Dr. Loftus, thanks, thanks for coming back. Thanks for being here once again, uh talking to us all things memory. We we kind of talked about the eyewitness stuff and now I want to move into the repressed memories and kind of want you to tee off this whole idea of the memory wars that happened, where this all kind of started and then where you fit into that.

[1:02] Elizabeth Okay so, um it was about 1990 and I got a call from a an attorney. His name is Doug Horngrad and he he said, “I’m I’m representing a man accused of murder. My client is George Franklin.” And um he said, “I used to be a public defender,” which to me meant he had a a lot of trial experience. He he was now in private practice. He tried many murder cases, but he had never seen anything like this. He said that his client was accused of murdering a little girl, an eight-year-old girl, 20 years earlier. And the only evidence in the case was the testimony of Franklin’s daughter, Eileen Franklin, who claimed that she saw her father rape and murder her little eight-year-old best friend, that she repressed the memory for 20 years and now the memory was back. Um she contacted the police, um the police get in touch with the prosecutor, and George Franklin is now being prosecuted for this 20-year-old murder. Eileen would also claim that she um repressed memories of being sexually abused by her father and and all kinds of other traumas that she supposedly endured. And so Horngrad said, “What what do you know about this idea of of repression of all these traumas including a murder that you supposedly witnessed?” I I said, “Well, it’s kind of a hand-me-down Freudian idea that you could take a whole bunch of traumas, banish them into the unconscious, wall them off from the rest of mental life, be completely unaware that these things happen to you, but that you could then dig them out, peel off that that layer of repression and have pristine memories of what happened.” Um but I’m not sure I I know what the evidence is for this. And so, I started to look and you know, one of the things I found was a fantastic uh article by a clinical psychologist researcher David Holmes, who had written 60 years of efforts to document this fundamental idea—no credible scientific support. So, uh you know, I I report this back to Horngrad. Um if these memories weren’t real, where could they have come from? Well, it was a highly publicized disappearance of the little girl, highly publicized when her body was found all over the the Bay Area press, TV, newspapers at the time. You know, maybe she learned about a lot of this stuff after the fact. Um but at trial, Franklin was convicted. Um because in addition to having the daughter testify about her recovered repressed memory, they also had a psychiatrist talk about in so many words blessing the memory and saying that she she believed, in so many words, she believed it it was authentic. And so, Franklin becomes virtually the first American citizen to be convicted based on nothing other than a claim of of the return of a repressed memory. Um and I I put that, you know, that was kind of a key point in the eruption of the memory wars. Because after the Franklin case, which showed that a jury is willing to believe in the idea of repress repressed memory and convict somebody of murder, uh we began to see case after case after case where people were uh remembering uh usually years of sexual trauma allegedly repressed and they were suing their parents, their former neighbors, their their former anybody claiming uh the recovery of repressed memory. And so, all this litigation was going on in the early 90s, um and we identify this as kind of the the peak of the the memory wars. I think that term was maybe first coined possibly by Frederick Crews, um a Berkeley um scholar who who well was a scholar of Freud and a critic of Freud. Uh anyhow, that’s uh that’s part of it. And so, you know, you had all these accusations being aired in courtrooms and um how are we going to defend against this?

[5:57] Steve If you can talk a little bit about the research that you did. You had the lost in the-mall studies that and then you and you know from what I understand is you do that and they’d be like, “Yeah that’s great Dr. Loftus, that doesn’t really equate to sexual abuse. It doesn’t really equate to Satanic rituals, right, that stuff.” So, you had to keep upping it and upping it and upping it and doing more and more and more. Can you talk a little bit about the progression of your research—how it started and where it had to get to to a point where you could support and at least defend some of these thoughts that you had?

[6:24] Elizabeth Well, so when I was involved as a as an expert in the Franklin case and and you know all I could really talk about is how we turned you know stop signs into yield signs or vice versa, made people believe there was broken glass in an accident when there wasn’t. If these memories of the daughter weren’t real, she had very very detailed memories. And if they if she had constructed this whole event based on information that she acquired afterward, that that just hadn’t really been studied. We needed to find a way to study how you could plant a seed and plant some information and watch a very richly detailed memory grow in the mind of an otherwise healthy human being. And it took me a few years after that case to come up with the idea. Um why don’t we try to plant a false memory that—because we weren’t going to be able to get permission to plant a false memory of sex abuse, but maybe we could plant a false memory of something else that would have been at least mildly traumatic if it had happened to a person when they were a young child. So eventually came upon the idea after years of like searching for it. Let’s uh let’s try to make people believe and remember when they were five or six years old, they were lost in a shopping mall, that they were frightened and crying and ultimately rescued by an elderly person, reunited with the family. And and that was the study we did. And the way we planted the false memory is to tell our research subject that we had talked to their mother, for example, that their mother had told us about certain childhood memories—we want to see what they could remember of these experiences if they can remember anything. And there were some true ones and then this fake one about being lost in the mall. And I I was kind of blown away with the 25% or so of our sample that fell sway to this suggestion and started to develop this false memory. So presented the work at a scientific meeting, uh published the article. Um even before it was published, people were criticizing it. They were saying, “You know, getting lost is so common. Show us you can plant a false memory of something that would be more unusual, more bizarre, more upsetting.” And other investigators came along and we too and and planted those more upsetting, more bizarre, more unusual false memories like like um nearly drowning and I mean to be rescued by a lifeguard, or getting attacked by a vicious animal, or committing a crime as a teenager and serious enough that the police came to investigate, or witnessing somebody being demonically possessed. And so, the literature began to fill with these studies of very rich false memories being planted in the minds of of uh ordinary people. So that that was something that grew out of this Franklin case. It started with with Franklin and it it it became an alternative explanation for some of the things that people were claiming.

[10:04] Steve Yeah and you know part of the thing too is you’ve had a lot of detractors in this too, right? I mean not everybody’s been happy with you. Uh you can talk a little bit about how you’ve been sued yourself as it relates to some of this, some of these cases that you’ve worked on. Um how you’ve had to have armed guards—talk can you talk a little bit about all the stuff that you’ve had to go through just as a researcher trying to present research?

[10:26] Elizabeth Yeah well people people didn’t like the idea that um somebody might be skeptical about memory. I mean it’s not comfortable having your memory be challenged. I I you know, I experienced that for myself uh during a recent um set of interviews with a New Yorker um uh writer who who was doing a profile of me for the New Yorker magazine and some of the people she interviewed said some things were that were totally false and and contradicted my memory. So, I know how uncomfortable that can be. And I think the fact that I and some others were were challenging or at least presenting an alternative uh explanation for a memory report, um it it was upsetting, disturbing to to people. And when I published a book about this subject, co-authored a book called The Myth of Repressed Memory, uh that brought out a bunch of people who, you know, would make threats of organizations that had invited me to speak. Um I had people try to drum up letter writing campaigns to the chair of my department or the dean of my school or the president of my university trying to get me fired. Um and it you know it—that they just didn’t like… well, they first of all they they created a caricature of what my position really was and then decided they hated the caricature and they were sometimes fighting dirty.

[12:03] Steve I know you’ve had to testify in some cases and and people because a lot of your a lot of your work’s been on the defense side, right? So of course, a lot of people have said, “How do you how can you defend someone like who’s been accused of what they’ve been accused of?” So, I guess how do you—what are your thoughts on that? I mean I have a general sense of where you’re coming from um but what do you say to those people that say, “How how dare you defend someone who’s accused of these things?”

[12:26] Elizabeth Well first of all, um when when I get a call from an attorney, they never call me and say, “I think he did it and I want you to help me get him off.” They say, “I don’t know whether he did it or not,” or they sometimes say, “I feel I may be dealing with an innocent person, and I’m scared to death of this situation.” And and I don’t know what I’m going to find when I start to review material, but I often find that people’s stories change over time. Why is that changing? What kind of um intervening influences were they subjected to? I I often find that people aren’t always g—you know, there’s evidence they may not be guilty of everything they’re accused of. Maybe some small things but not everything and every big thing and every single person who came along to say something bad about them. So, there’s a lot to find when you can actually get into the police reports and a medical records and therapist depositions and all the other evidence that becomes available that the public doesn’t know about, um that does raise some issues in the case. Uh and you know, I’m not there to be a character witness for the person. I’m just there to talk about the science of memory and the you know, the litigators can use this information and to try to make arguments that they may want to make. But uh I’m not sure everybody understands that that that is the role. It’s not that I’m you know insisting to a jury that these people are innocent. That doesn’t happen. Although I do have to say that some of the opposing experts are more than willing to say in so many words, “I believe their memories are real,” and I don’t think they have any business doing that and I’m not going to make the opposite mistake.

[14:30] Steve Have you not—is there is there when you’re talking about some people whether or not they have repressed memories or whether or not they’re they’re able to remember things being lost in a shopping mall or or whatever, is there any sort of once again any sort of kind of like psychological markers, characteristics of anything that lead people to be a little bit more sub uh susceptible to suggestion?

[14:49] Elizabeth There are individual differences, you know. And you as a psychologist know that when you’re interested in a phenomenon often, you’ll then look look to see you know which kinds of people are most affected or least affected, whatever. So, in the false memory area or the power of suggestion, we’ve done that too. And I can tell you that uh people who have lapses in memory and attention—if they frequently can’t remember whether they just did something or or just thought about doing it—they’re somewhat more susceptible. If they’re a highly cooperative person part and particularly if they are a little low in cognitive ability, that combination they’re going to be somewhat more susceptible. But these are you know correlations, maybe they get as high as about .3 if you’re into correlations. They’re not super whopping. And but we we do have to keep in mind that some of the most intelligent and educated and experienced people that we share this planet with have developed false memories, some of which have been kind of embarrassing for people.

[15:57] Steve Yeah, reminds me of uh Hillary Clinton, right? When she came in under heavy gunfire and that and they found out later that it it wasn’t anything remotely close to that, but in her mind, it was true and it was real. And from what I remember she was a little bit embarrassed after the fact when it came out that it wasn’t how she remembered it, but in her mind that’s the way it was.

[16:18] Elizabeth Well, I love that example of Hillary Clinton. Yeah, and I’ve used that occasionally in my talks. She, when she was campaigning, she talked about how she landed in Bosnia under sniper fire. Um people then produced videos and photographs of this very peaceful landing. Um there were children there, they were she was there with her daughter Chelsea, they were handing her flowers. And and and she, when confronted with this evidence, like this is very you know brave I think and and and good of her, she said, “You know I had a different memory. That proves I’m human.” She said that proves I’m human, which for some people is a revelation. So, I she was able to be humorous about it. And if you know I would love to sit down and talk to her one day about uh about how that happened. But if I could speculate with you, Steve, about what I think may have happened and makes a lot of sense to me is, first of all, the landing was maybe a decade earlier. It was we’re talking about an older memory. Um that she goes through a briefing—by the way, this could happen, there could be sniper fire and if this happens here’s what we’re going to do, there’s a plan. And and maybe you know 10, 12 years later she remembers the plan and not the actuality. And and you know that’s how I’d make sense of that story. Um not not to have to assume that when she was campaigning, she wanted to make herself look more heroic and so she made up the story, right? The other the other explanation makes a lot more sense to me.

[17:56] Steve I think that’s interesting. Like you said, there’s probably a lot more to to these stories and once you dig them out. And I think, you know, from what I understand and listening to you is that when you’re going through and you’re working on these cases, you almost have to be an investigator as you’re going through this, as you’re reading the transcripts, as you’re reading the depositions, as you’re going through all these things, that you’re trying to look for these different bits and pieces to help explain why someone’s doing something or why they said something versus whether they made it up or not. But you have to dig in and become an investigator.

[18:26] Elizabeth Right. Well, and and you know I have a lot more information um just from all these documents. Not as much as maybe a jury has, but certainly a whole lot more than the public has that’s only um you know getting the internet news or TV news.

[18:47] Steve I wanted to kind of talk a little bit—I mean are you still, I’m assuming you’re still testifying as an expert or… I mean you don’t have to talk about the details of these cases and stuff, but I’m assuming you’re still testifying in court about uh witness testimony, repressed memories and that?

[19:01] Elizabeth Yes, yes. Okay.

[19:05] Steve And if someone needs to get a hold of you and someone wants to reach out to you—to I’m sure you probably got more business than you need but if anybody…

[19:11] Elizabeth Well, I I actually you know I have to I give most of my cases away because there’s so many. But um but you know you can reach—the best way to reach me is by email like like you did.

[19:24] Steve That’s right. All right Dr. Loftus, I won’t use up any more of your time. Greatly appreciate you coming on and providing our listeners and the audience with a lot of great information as it relates to memory. As always, go to courtroomsciences.com—blogs, podcasts, and other information about our company is up there. Thanks for joining us, this has been another edition of the litigation psychology podcast brought to you by Courtroom Sciences.