Elizabeth Loftus False Memory Summary

I came across this article years ago on TED called “Elizabeth Loftus: How reliable is your memory? (2003).” Loftus is a psychologist who studies memories. She studies false memories and false memory is when a person is very susceptible to a suggestion which can create a memory of events that never really happened. I think most people can relate to having a false memory, I know I can but, Loftus goes more in-depth with her findings on false memory and shows you just how detrimental your memory is.
Loftus worked on a case for a man named Titus. You see, Titus was accused of raping a female hitchhiker. The police gathered information from the victim and the victim said that Titus’s car sort of resembled the rapist’s car. They took a picture of Titus and then showed it to the victim in a lineup. The victim said “That one’s the closest.” Titus went into the courtroom and there the victim said that she was positive he was the man and Titus went to jail. They later found the real rapist but Titus is not only person to have been wrongfully convicted of a crime based on somebody's false memory. There was a study done in the United States where they gathered 300 people who …show more content…
The subjects in this study were all members of the United States military. They had to undergo a training exercise to teach them what it would be like if they were ever captured as a prisoner of war. The soldiers were all interrogated in an aggressive way for 30 minutes and afterwards they had to identify their interrogator. Loftus fed them suggestive information that insinuated it was a different interrogator and many of them misidentified their interrogator. Most of them picked a man who was much heavier in weight and had a head full of brown curly hair. When in fact the actual interrogator was much thinner and completely bald. See how suggested information can change one’s