False Memory Elizabeth Lotus

Many people tend to remember things that didn’t happen or remember them differently from the way they really and that is what we call false memories. This is something Elizabeth Lotus had studied about. She begins her debriefing by starting with a story of Steve Titus who was arrested back in 1980 because he had slightly matched a physical description, and drove a similar car, to a man who had raped a woman in the area. The police officer who had pulled him over had taken a picture of Titus and put it in a photo lineup experiment, they later showed it to the victim, which the police had informed consent, and she pointed to Titus’ photo saying, “That one’s the closest.” With that said, the police had Titus go into trial for rape.
As the rape victim saw Titus, she got up and said, “I’m absolutely positive that’s the man.” And that was when Titus was convicted. He wanted to prove his innocence by calling up an investigative journalist. He later found the real rapist, who had confessed to all of his rapes. With …show more content…
Thus a placebo effect had occurred within the dependent variables. The false memory that they planted had the people not wanting to eat the foods as much. The idea of false memory isn’t bad but it may be helpful. Lotus said that if we planted a warm, fuzzy memory involving a healthy food like asparagus, then we could convert people within our culture into eating more. She said that planting false memories could have repercussions that affect behavior long after the memories take hold. In conclusion, Lotus said, “Just because somebody tells you something and they said it with confidence, just because they say it with lots of detail, just because they express emotion when they say it, it doesn’t mean that it really happened. We can’t reliably distinguish true memories from false memories. We need independent