- Elizabeth Loftus is Distinguished Professor at the University of California - Irvine. She holds faculty positions i... moreElizabeth Loftus is Distinguished Professor at the University of California - Irvine. She holds faculty positions in the Department of Psychology & Social Behavior; the Department of Criminology, Law & Society, and the School of Law She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Since then, she has published 22 books and over 500 scientific articles. Loftus's research has focused on the malleability of human memory. She has been recognized for her research with seven honorary doctorates and election to numerous prestigious societies, including the National Academy of Sciences. She is past president of the Association for Psychological Science, the Western Psychological Association, and the American Psychology-Law Society.
Loftus’s memory research has led to her being called as an expert witness or consultant in hundreds of cases. Some of the more well known cases include the McMartin PreSchool Molestation case, the Hillside Strangler, the Abscam cases, the trial of Oliver North, the trial of the officers accused in the Rodney King beating, the Menendez brothers, the Bosnian War trials in the Hague, the Oklahoma Bombing case, and litigation involving Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, and the Duke University Lacrosse players.edit
When people learn that an event has occurred, they often report that they expected it all along. The present study explored this “hindsight bias” for the outcome of a national referendum on abortion. Participants rated the probability of... more
When people learn that an event has occurred, they often report that they expected it all along. The present study explored this “hindsight bias” for the outcome of a national referendum on abortion. Participants rated the probability of the referendum passing one week before polling day, and then recalled their original estimates one week and one year post‐referendum. The magnitude and direction of bias was predicted by voting choice: People on the losing side exhibited a classic hindsight bias, and remembered believing the outcome to be roughly 16% more likely than they originally reported. In contrast, people on the winning side exhibited a weak reversal of the typical bias. Hindsight bias was moderated by feelings of surprise in both groups. This study suggests that individuals on the losing side of political campaigns may be especially likely to misremember their prior expectations if the outcome is disappointing but not unexpected.
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Abstract: This chapter describes how, as the population of elderly citizens continues to increase in the United States, a greater number of older adults will become victims of crimes and later report their experiences to police,... more
Abstract: This chapter describes how, as the population of elderly citizens continues to increase in the United States, a greater number of older adults will become victims of crimes and later report their experiences to police, attorneys, and juries, and perhaps even attempt to identify the perpetrators. In fact, we already know that roughly 2 million elderly individuals become victims of crime each year. Likewise, older Americans will become disproportionately represented among accident victims, witnesses in civil and criminal ...
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Purpose. In this research we assessed whether after a subtle suggestion, participants could be led to falsely remember that they had experienced certain items on a key list, when in fact those items were taken from stories they had... more
Purpose. In this research we assessed whether after a subtle suggestion, participants could be led to falsely remember that they had experienced certain items on a key list, when in fact those items were taken from stories they had constructed.Method. In three experiments 78 participants created a story either about themselves (Expts 1 and 2) or about their partner (Expt 3). In Session 1 they brought their stories to the experimental session and were presented with a list of words. The next day, in Session 2, they received a subtle suggestion that some ‘story’ words were on the presented list. One day later, in Session 3, they had a recognition task where list words were mixed with story words, and they tried to recognize the list words. In addition, for each ‘recognized’ word they gave a remember/know response.Results. In all three experiments when participants falsely recognized their story words and claimed they were list items, they also reported that they genuinely ‘remembered’ the story items from the list, as opposed to simply ‘knowing’ that they had been previously presented on the list. These special false alarms occurred not only when participants had generated a story about themselves, but also when they read a story about themselves, or generated a story about another person.Discussion. These findings indicate that self‐generation and self‐referencing are factors that modify the memory quality of false recognitions, so that false recognition has a recollective quality that is as strong as the recollective quality of correct recognitions.
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ABSTRACT Wixted et al. (in press. Doing right by the eyewitness evidence: A response to Berkowitz et al. Memory) remind us that they are aware of some conditions in which confidence does not trump all but suggest that initial... more
ABSTRACT Wixted et al. (in press. Doing right by the eyewitness evidence: A response to Berkowitz et al. Memory) remind us that they are aware of some conditions in which confidence does not trump all but suggest that initial high-confidence errors should be rare. In this reply, we draw attention to new lab research that continues to cast doubt on the value of an initial eyewitness identification made with high confidence. Additional data from field studies of police lineups lead us to conclude that it is far too risky in real-world cases to assume that eyewitnesses who have high initial confidence are also highly accurate. As a final point, we dispute Wixted et al.’s interpretation of “initial low confidence” in the DNA exoneration cases.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Photography, Psychotherapy, False Memory, and 14 moreDreams, Autobiographical Memory, Hypnosis, Prospective studies, Humans, Child, Child Abuse, Male, Mental Disorders, Adult, Retrospective Studies, Traumatic Memories, Imagery In Psychotherapy, and Life Change Events
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American criminal and civil courts are heavily dependent upon memorybased reports to provide relevant evidence for virtually every kind of case before them. Such reports come from both lay and expert witnesses and span the gamut of... more
American criminal and civil courts are heavily dependent upon memorybased reports to provide relevant evidence for virtually every kind of case before them. Such reports come from both lay and expert witnesses and span the gamut of memories of all kinds—such as memory for people, or of specifics of events, conversations, objects, timing, and even one's own past thoughts and cognitive processes. Likewise, the courts are dependent upon those who must judge those memories to reasonably assess their accuracy. This double ...
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Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people’s susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to... more
Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people’s susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to misremembering events. Recent research suggests that pregoal emotions—those experienced before goal attainment or failure (e.g., hope, fear)—narrow the scope of people’s attention to information that is central to their goals. This narrow focus can impair memory for peripheral details, leaving people vulnerable to misinformation concerning those details. In contrast, postgoal emotions—those experienced after goal attainment or failure (e.g., happiness, sadness)—broaden the scope of attention leaving people more resistant to misinformation. Implications for legal contexts, such as emotion-related errors in eyewitness testimony, are discussed.status: publishe
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Politically oriented “fake news”—false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person—is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by... more
Politically oriented “fake news”—false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person—is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three versions of fake news labels with 541 online participants in a two-wave study. A warning that came before a false headline was initially very effective in both discouraging belief in false headlines generally and eliminating a partisan congruency effect (the tendency to believe politically congenial information more readily than politically uncongenial information). In the follow-up survey two weeks later, however, we found both high levels of belief in the articles and the re-emergence of a par...
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In a widely cited article, a simple experiment with 7-year-old students was described (Varendonck, 1911; translated by Hazan, Hazan, & Goodman, 1984). The students were asked to think about a very familiar teacher, Mr. H. The... more
In a widely cited article, a simple experiment with 7-year-old students was described (Varendonck, 1911; translated by Hazan, Hazan, & Goodman, 1984). The students were asked to think about a very familiar teacher, Mr. H. The experimenter then asked," What is the color of Mr. H's beard?" Of 18 students, 16 wrote" black." The other two wrote nothing. In reality, Mr. H. had no beard. Varendonck's (1911) conclusion from this and similar studies was:" a question asked badly can result in erroneous information about a person that ...
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Several laboratory techniques have been developed over the last few decades that reliably produce memory distortions. However, it is unclear whether false memory production in one experimental paradigm will predict susceptibility to false... more
Several laboratory techniques have been developed over the last few decades that reliably produce memory distortions. However, it is unclear whether false memory production in one experimental paradigm will predict susceptibility to false memories in other paradigms. In Experiment 1, 202 undergraduates participated in a misinformation experiment and semiautobiographical tasks involving three measures of memory distortion (suggestion, imagination, emotion). We established high internal consistency in individual differences measures and statistically significant experimental effects where we would expect them (e.g., the misinformation effect). However, false memory production in one task did not predict false memories in other paradigms. In Experiment 2, 163 adults participated in a misinformation experiment, a false memory word list task (Deese–Roediger–McDermott), and semiautobiographical false news story tasks. Again we found no consistent predictive relationships among various false memories. In both studies, no individual differences predicted memory distortion susceptibility consistently across tasks and across experiments. At this time, false memory production in a given laboratory task does not appear to adequately predict false memories in other tasks, a finding with implications for using these tasks to predict memory distortion in real world situations