Elizabeth F Loftus
Biographic Data
| ID | 1493211 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth F Loftus |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth F |
| FAMILY NAME | Loftus |
| SIGNATURE | LOFTUS E F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2230-6110 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 79 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 221 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 79 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Who believes in repressed memories? The roles of gender, age, and education in a national sample of United States adults
Public belief in repressed memories remains widespread, yet little is known about the demographic predictors of this belief. We examined beliefs about the repression, permanence, and reliability of memory in a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 1,545). Nearly all participants (94%) expressed belief in unconscious repressed memory. Belief in repression was high across all groups, with the highest rates among women without a colle…
From primary to presidency: Fake news, false memory, and changing attitudes in the 2016 election
During a contentious primary campaign, people may argue passionately against a candidate they later support during the general election. How do people reconcile such potentially conflicting attitudes? This study followed 602 United States citizens, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, at three points throughout the 2016 presidential election investigating how attitudes and preferences changed over time and how people remembered their past feeli…
The messy landscape of eye movements and false memories
Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a common treatment for PTSD. However, skeptics like James Ost question the theoretical underpinnings, highlight inconsistency of empirical findings surrounding the efficacy of such therapy, and warn against unknown drawbacks. Little is known about the impact of the eye movements, a critical component in EMDR, on susceptibility to false memories, and the existing literature is contrad…
Eyewitness confidence may not be ready for the courts: A reply to Wixted et al
) 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 e…
Convicting with confidence? Why we should not over-rely on eyewitness confidence
Eyewitness memory researchers have recently devoted considerable attention to eyewitness confidence. While there is strong consensus that courtroom confidence is problematic, we now recognise that an eyewitness's initial confidence in their first identification - in certain contexts - can be of value. A few psychological scientists, however, have confidently, but erroneously claimed that in real-world cases, eyewitness initial confidence is the m…
Belief in Unconscious Repressed Memory Persists
On the basis of converging research, we concluded that the controversial topic of unconscious blockage of psychological trauma (i.e., repressed memory) remains very much alive in clinical, legal, and academic contexts. In his commentary, Brewin (this issue, p. 443) conducted a cocitation analysis and concluded that scholars do not adhere to the concept of unconscious repression. Furthermore, he argued that previous survey research did not specifi…
Push polls increase false memories for fake news stories
Push polls are an insidious means of disseminating information under the guise of a legitimate information-gathering poll (e.g., “Would you be more or less likely to vote for X if you heard they were being investigated for tax fraud?”). While previous research has shown that push polls can affect attitudes, the current study assessed whether exposure to push polls can increase false memories for corresponding fake news stories. Across four studie…
Remembering facts versus feelings in the wake of political events
Amid rising political polarisation, inaccurate memory for facts and exaggerated memories of grievances can drive individuals and groups further apart. We assessed whether people with more accurate memories of the facts concerning political events were less susceptible to bias when remembering how events made them feel. Study 1 assessed participants' memories concerning the 2016 U.S. presidential election ( N = 571), and included 33 individuals wi…
Pandemics and infodemics: Research on the effects of misinformation on memory
On social media and in everyday life, people are often exposed to misinformation. Decades of research have shown that exposure to misinformation can have significant impacts on people's thoughts, actions, and memories. During global pandemics like COVID-19, people are likely exposed to heightened quantities of misinformation as they search for and are exposed to copious amounts of information about the disease and its effects. This media environm…
Fool me twice: How effective is debriefing in false memory studies
Deception is often necessary in false memory studies, especially when the study aims to explore the effect of misinformation on memory. At the end of the study, participants are debriefed, but does this eliminate the influence of misinformation? In the current study, we followed up 630 participants six months after they participated in a study in which they were exposed to fabricated political news stories. We compared the memories of these "cont…
Eyewitness confidence malleability: Misinformation as post-identification feedback
These results highlight the need for lineup administrators to both ask for and document verbatim witness confidence at the time of the initial identification. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
Eyewitness Science and the Legal System
For more than four decades, I have been studying the malleable nature of human memory. For most of this time period, I have also played a role as a consultant or expert in many legal cases that hinged on eyewitness testimony or other memory evidence. Here I describe some of the science that reveals how error prone eyewitnesses can be. Getting the legal field to recognize potential problems with memory evidence, and taking steps to solve those pro…
The Intractability of Inaccurate Eyewitness Identification
Inaccurate eyewitness testimony is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. As early as 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized this danger, but the tests it promulgated to distinguish reliable from unreliable eyewitness testimony were based largely on surmise. More recently, substantial research has demonstrated that, while significant improvements can be made in the manner in which lineups, photo arrays, and other identification procedures are …
False Memories
The trauma model of dissociation: Inconvenient truths and stubborn fictions. Comment on Dalenberg et al. (2012)
Dalenberg et al. (2012) argued that convincing evidence (a) supports the longstanding trauma model (TM), which posits that early trauma plays a key role in the genesis of dissociation; and (b) refutes the fantasy model (FM), which posits that fantasy proneness, suggestibility, cognitive failures, and other variables foster dissociation. We review evidence bearing on Dalenberg et al.'s 8 predictions and find them largely wanting in empirical suppo…
Recent advances in false memory research
In the last few years, substantial gains have been made in our understanding of human memory errors and the phenomenon of false memory, wherein individuals remember entire events that did not happen at all. Research had established that false memories can be consequential and emotional, that they can last for long periods of time, and that they are not merely the product of demand characteristics or the recovery of extant but hidden memories. The…
Eyewitness Memory for People and Events
Although the criminal justice system relies heavily on accounts that people give from their memories, it has no articulated theory of memory. This chapter is a broad review of the science of eyewitness memory that covers not only eyewitness identification of criminal suspects but also memories for events. Misinformation effects, characteristics of true versus false memories, and the role of imagination in developing false memories are discussed. …
False memories of fabricated political events
Intelligence gathering post-9/11
The gathering of information for intelligence purposes often comes from interviewing a variety of individuals. Some, like suspects and captured prisoners, are individuals for whom the stakes are especially high and who might not be particularly cooperative. But information is also gathered from myriad individuals who have relevant facts to provide, and occasionally the smallest details can be important. In gathering this information from both gro…
Insightful or wishful: Lawyers' ability to predict case outcomes
Lawyers’ litigation forecasts play an integral role in the justice system. In the course of litigation, lawyers constantly make strategic decisions and/or advise their clients on the basis of their perceptions and predictions of case outcomes. The study investigated the realism in predictions by a sample of attorneys (n=481) across the United States who specified a minimum goal to achieve in a case set for trial. They estimated their chances of m…
Psychological Science, Victim Advocates, and the Problem of Recovered Memories
Defined in hazy terms by Freud and bereft of attention for a century afterwards, the concept of repression suddenly gained public prominence in the 1980s, at the same time that child sexual abuse (CSA) was finally achieving widespread recognition as an important societal problem. However, despite its public and therapeutic popularity, a convincing scientific case still has not been made for the existence of repression. Recent research establishes…
False claims about false memory research
Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory: Figure 1.
The misinformation effect refers to the impairment in memory for the past that arises after exposure to misleading information. The phenomenon has been investigated for at least 30 years, as investigators have addressed a number of issues. These include the conditions under which people are especially susceptible to the negative impact of misinformation, and conversely when are they resistant. Warnings about the potential for misinformation somet…
Recollection in the Kingdom of Aids
On science under legal assault
The reality of repressed memories
Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Remembering and Repressing
Women involved in out-patient treatment for substance abuse were interviewed to examine their recollections of childhood sexual abuse. Overall, 54% of the 105 women reported a history of childhood sexual abuse. Of these, the majority (81%) remembered all or part of the abuse their whole lives; 19% reported they forgot the abuse for a period of time, and later the memory returned. Women who remembered the abuse their whole lives reported a clearer…
On the permanence of stored information in the human brain
Improving the Ability of Jurors to Comprehend and Apply Criminal Jury Instructions
The complexity and linguistic construction of jury instructions can inhibit jurors' ability to comprehend and apply the law. Study 1 analyzes questions asked by actual deliberating jurors in order to identify sources of juror misunderstanding in criminal pattern jury instructions. Instructions concerning "reasonable doubt," criminal "intent," the use of evidence concerning prior convictions, and the general duties of jurors, are selected for furt…
Make-believe memories
Research on memory distortion has shown that postevent suggestion can contaminate what a person remembers. Moreover, suggestion can lead to false memories being injected outright into the minds of people. These findings have implications for police investigation, clinical practice, and other settings in which memory reports are solicited
False memories of fabricated political events
A Tale of Two Questions: Benefits of Asking More Than One Question
Journal Article A TALE OF TWO QUESTIONS: BENEFITS OF ASKING MORE THAN ONE QUESTION Get access ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS, ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS is Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, MARK KLINGER and KYLE SMITH recently received their Ph.D.s from that department, JUDITH FIEDLER is a Research Associate at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. This research was supported by Grant Number HS 05521 from the National …
Trivial persuasion in the courtroom: The power of (a few) minor details
Investigated the influence of trivial testimonial detail on judgments of 424 undergraduates who served as mock jurors. Ss read a summary of a court case involving robbery and murder. In Experiment 1, detailed testimony influenced judgments of guilt, even when the detail was unrelated to the culprit. In Experiment 2, detailed testimony was especially powerful when an opposing witness testified that she could not remember the trivial details. Subse…
Distortions in the Memory of Children
One does not have far to go to find expressions of the belief in the extreme suggestibility of children. But are children more suggestible than adults? The memory of adults is readily contaminated; by comparison, children appear to be more easily influenced in only some instances. If an event is not encoded well, or if a delay weakens the child's memory relative to an adult's, then differences in memory may emerge. On the other hand, if an event …
Intelligence gathering post-9/11
The gathering of information for intelligence purposes often comes from interviewing a variety of individuals. Some, like suspects and captured prisoners, are individuals for whom the stakes are especially high and who might not be particularly cooperative. But information is also gathered from myriad individuals who have relevant facts to provide, and occasionally the smallest details can be important. In gathering this information from both gro…
Insightful or wishful: Lawyers' ability to predict case outcomes
Lawyers’ litigation forecasts play an integral role in the justice system. In the course of litigation, lawyers constantly make strategic decisions and/or advise their clients on the basis of their perceptions and predictions of case outcomes. The study investigated the realism in predictions by a sample of attorneys (n=481) across the United States who specified a minimum goal to achieve in a case set for trial. They estimated their chances of m…
Money, Sex, and Death: Gender Bias in Wrongful Death Damage Awards
Civil damage awards in wrongful death cases and experimental data from jury simulations reveal that male decedents are typically awarded substantially higher monetary damages than are similarly situated female decedents. These differences in treatment may arise because female decedents are perceived as worth less, female survivors are perceived as more needy, and/or male decedents are perceived to have a longer lost income stream than any female …
The influence of the form of the question on the eyewitness testimony of preschool children
From primary to presidency: Fake news, false memory, and changing attitudes in the 2016 election
During a contentious primary campaign, people may argue passionately against a candidate they later support during the general election. How do people reconcile such potentially conflicting attitudes? This study followed 602 United States citizens, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, at three points throughout the 2016 presidential election investigating how attitudes and preferences changed over time and how people remembered their past feeli…
Eyewitness Science and the Legal System
For more than four decades, I have been studying the malleable nature of human memory. For most of this time period, I have also played a role as a consultant or expert in many legal cases that hinged on eyewitness testimony or other memory evidence. Here I describe some of the science that reveals how error prone eyewitnesses can be. Getting the legal field to recognize potential problems with memory evidence, and taking steps to solve those pro…
The Intractability of Inaccurate Eyewitness Identification
Inaccurate eyewitness testimony is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. As early as 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized this danger, but the tests it promulgated to distinguish reliable from unreliable eyewitness testimony were based largely on surmise. More recently, substantial research has demonstrated that, while significant improvements can be made in the manner in which lineups, photo arrays, and other identification procedures are …
Recent advances in false memory research
In the last few years, substantial gains have been made in our understanding of human memory errors and the phenomenon of false memory, wherein individuals remember entire events that did not happen at all. Research had established that false memories can be consequential and emotional, that they can last for long periods of time, and that they are not merely the product of demand characteristics or the recovery of extant but hidden memories. The…
Psychological Science, Victim Advocates, and the Problem of Recovered Memories
Defined in hazy terms by Freud and bereft of attention for a century afterwards, the concept of repression suddenly gained public prominence in the 1980s, at the same time that child sexual abuse (CSA) was finally achieving widespread recognition as an important societal problem. However, despite its public and therapeutic popularity, a convincing scientific case still has not been made for the existence of repression. Recent research establishes…
On science under legal assault
More on the repressed memory debate: A reply to Alpert, Brown, and Courtois (1998)
Adult recollections of childhood abuse: Cognitive and developmental perspectives
Increasingly during the 1980s, the specters of two equally awful phenomena arose. Genuine sexual victimization became more and more visible, and many victims were not believed when they came forward. A separate but also painful problem is the realization that innocent people have been accused of these crimes, with attendant devastation for themselves and their families. An understanding of these two types of life-shattering phenomena requires a c…
Retrieval from semantic memory by young children
Olver and Hornsby (1966) asked young children to tell them how different items were alike. For example, how are and alike? At the age of 6, over half of the groupings made by children are what Olver and Hornsby call groupings [p. 74]; that is, are constructed on the basis of a common feature(s) characterizing the items included in the group. Thus, for example, banana, peach, and potato can be placed in a superordinate grouping because they are al…
Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory
Leading questions and the eyewitness report
A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing.
This paper presents a spreading-acti vation theory of human semantic processing, which can be applied to a wide range of recent experimental results. The theory is based on Quillian's theory of semantic memory search and semantic preparation, or priming. In conjunction with this, several of the miscondeptions concerning Qullian's theory are discussed. A number of additional assumptions are proposed for his theory in order to apply it to recent ex…
Explorations in Cognition
Follies of affirmative action
Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory.
A total of 1,242 subjects, in five experiments plus a pilot study, saw a series of slides depicting a single auto-pedestrian accident. The purpose of these experiments was to investigate how information supplied after an event influences a witness's memory for that event. Subjects were exposed to either consistent, misleading, or irrelevant information after the accident event. Misleading information produced less accurate responding on both a ye…
The influence of the form of the question on the eyewitness testimony of preschool children
Trial by data: Psychological research as legal evidence
Trial by data: Psychological research as legal evidence
The psychology of eyewitness testimony
On the permanence of stored information in the human brain
"The psychologist as expert witness": Reply to Sokal
"The psychologist as expert witness": Reply to Sokal
Eyewitness Testimony: Psychological Research and Legal Thought
Most psychological studies of eyewitness testimony conducted during this century are aimed at discovering factors influencing the accuracy and completeness of an eyewitness account, with emphasis on those factors affecting the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of complex information. Recent studies have focused on some new issues, particularly the impact of eyewitness testimony in a legal proceeding. Research suggests that jurors place too mu…
Human Inference and Judgment: Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full
Improving the Ability of Jurors to Comprehend and Apply Criminal Jury Instructions
The complexity and linguistic construction of jury instructions can inhibit jurors' ability to comprehend and apply the law. Study 1 analyzes questions asked by actual deliberating jurors in order to identify sources of juror misunderstanding in criminal pattern jury instructions. Instructions concerning "reasonable doubt," criminal "intent," the use of evidence concerning prior convictions, and the general duties of jurors, are selected for furt…
Whose shadow is crooked? Comment
Silence is not golden
Should psychologists present in court information concerning the psychological research on eyewitness testimony? This article suggests that documented of convictions of innocent people based on faulty eyewitness accounts conservatively tell us that there is room for improvement in our legal procedures. One suggested improvement is to educate jurors through expert testimony. Nearly century of research has been conducted on the psychological factor…
Whose Shadow Is Crooked? Comment
Silence is not golden
Distortions in the Memory of Children
One does not have far to go to find expressions of the belief in the extreme suggestibility of children. But are children more suggestible than adults? The memory of adults is readily contaminated; by comparison, children appear to be more easily influenced in only some instances. If an event is not encoded well, or if a delay weakens the child's memory relative to an adult's, then differences in memory may emerge. On the other hand, if an event …
Cognitive psychology meets the national survey
Cognitive psychology meets the national survey
Eyewitness Performance in Different Psychological Types
A study of 112 subjects examined the performance on a complex memory task by various Jungian psychological types. Although differences did not emerge in terms of overall accuracy, they did emerge in terms of susceptibility to postevent information. Introverts and intuitives, alone and in combination, were found to be more prone to accept both misleading and consistent postevent information, rendering them more likely to be inaccurate in the first…
Psychology (74 works) · Cognitive psychology (41 works) · Memory Processes and Influences (36 works) · Social Psychology (35 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Deception detection and forensic psychology (22 works) · Political science (20 works) · Recall (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works)