21 phrases of Elizabeth Loftus

Elizabeth Loftus, the influential mathematics and psychologist, born in 1944, has left a legacy of phrases significant enough to reflect for a while.

Elizabeth Loftus production has been very prolific, because it has come to publish more than 500 scientific articles and about twenty books.

His themes of greatest interest have been those in which he addresses the issue of memory and how it can be modified.

He has received quite significant awards, such as the Gold Medal For Lifetime Achievement, for the APA, as well as the John Maddox, in 2016.

Next, some of Elizabeth Loftus phrases with more force.

20 phrases of Elizabeth Loftus

Memory works like a Wikipedia page: you can enter there and change it, but other people can also.

"In real life, as well as in experiments, people can believe things that never happened".

To be cautious, one should not have great confidence as an absolute guarantee of anything.

Solo because someone tells you something and says it with certainty, I used because they say it with many details, it was found because they express a lot of emotion when they say it, it does not mean that it really happened.

Even if it is going to be a harmful memory, they don't want to miss it. (This is) the reason why sometimes with so much resistance in the work I do. Because you are telling people that their mind can be full of much more fiction than they believe. And people don't like that.

The results were clear: the new environment inhibited recognition.

What would you prefer to have? A child with obesity, heart problems a short life, diabetes, or maybe a little false memory?

Therapists probably cannot do it ethically, and may have provisions against deception in their behavior standards. But bad governments, bad people, have no behavior requirements. When we recently publish a study on the planting of false memories among the US soldiers. UU., I worried that we were presenting a recipe of how you can do horrible things to someone and then erase their memory.

We saw that memories could be implemented that would be traumatic if they had really happened, such as having been attacked by an animal or suffered an accident.

The problem is clear: the lack of reliability of the identification tests of eye witnesses raises one of the most serious problems in the administration of Criminal Justice and civil litigation.

Giving people wrong details can alter what you remember from past events. This phenomenon is known as misinformation effect.

It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what has been affirmed in these cases of repressed memory is something, by definition, which is too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness and memory. They say that, to move forward in life, you had to cover this memory, because it would be too painful to live with him. Then, finally, enter therapy and go through the barrier of repression and this first memory comes out. But there really is no credible scientific support for that notion.

Through the past you can condition the future, if they make you believe that as a child you put bad taking something, you will not want it.

When I left the university I did many experiments on how memory can be altered.

People remember their notes better than they were, they believe they voted in elections in which they did not participate, that they gave more to the charity of what they actually donated or that their children walked and talked before when they did.

We do it alone. Maybe it helps us to live a happier life and feel better with ourselves.

False news will contribute to people build memories about things that never happened.

It is inevitable to relate false memories to false news and social networks. The information we receive is contaminated.

I'm not sure. Even if we educate people and warn them of memory distortion, they will continue to be vulnerable.

There are individuals with an extraordinary memory of almost everything that has happened to them during their adult life. My colleagues who study them are called people with highly superior autobiographical memory.

They can be between 10% and 20% of false confessions. And they look like the false memories of the accusers.

These are some of Elizabeth Loftus's phrases that have caused more impression, since the author has dedicated himself to the study of false memory and how many people believe they remember things that never happened, even in judicial processes.

Bibliography

• Christianson, s., Goodman, j., & Loftus, and. F. (1992). Eyewitness Memory for Stressful Events: Methodological Quándaries and Ethical Dilemmas. The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research and Theory, 217-241.
• Loftus, e. F. (1998). FALSCHE ERINNERUNGEN. Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 1, 62-67.
• Loftus, e. F., & Schooler, J. W. (1985). Information Processing Conceptualizations of Human Cognition: Past, present and future. Information & Behavior, 225-251.
• Loftus, e. (1980). Language and Memories in the Judicial System. Language Use and The Usses of Language, 257-268.