Make-believe memories

In the Bill Murray Christmas classic Scrooged, protagonist Frank Cross is challenged by the Ghost of Christmas Past to recollect some childhood memory not associated with television. “I played baseball,” he offers in one of my favorite and often-quoted lines, “One year, I hit the home-run that won the big game.” “That was the kid on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” the ghost retorts, much to Cross’s dismay. According to Elizabeth Loftus, false memories are actually a real phenomenon occurring in otherwise perfectly sane people. Her experiments show that false memories are usually the result of misinformation provided through a number of means by the experimenter, and can be elaborated upon from information pulled from the patient’s actual memories.

In experiments, one procedure employed by Loftus involved exposing participants to an actual incident, such as a simulated car accident, and providing them with false information about the event. Misinformation was supplied to the experimental group via leading questions (such as a question suggesting the presence of broken glass when in fact there was none), or by blatant misstatements of fact. The control group was made up of participants exposed to the same accident but who were not asked leading questions. Her experiments of this type proved that leading questions can have a profound impact on the “invented” memories of individuals involved.

Another experimental procedure involved telling participants about a fabricated childhood experience they presumably had, and informing them that family members had vouched for the authenticity of the story. According to Loftus, subjects often feigned remembering the fictional event, claiming to recall specific and invented details pulled from either memories of actual experienced events, from events others experienced which they heard stories about, or from purely their imagination.

By disseminating misinformation and misleading test participants, Loftus claims to have proven that when provided with faulty information individuals can fabricate oftentimes elaborate memories for themselves. And while I personally agree that the evidence suggests this, I would dispute the assumption that their memories are believed by them to be real. In essence, Loftus and her fellow researchers, who—within the confines of the experiment—are in positions of relative power and influence over the test subjects—are outright lying to participants and asking them to recall nonexistent events and details. Here is a classic case of observer bias—the participants don’t question the researcher’s mention of broken glass at the scene of an accident where there really was none, and add that fine detail to their own recollections and assume it to be true. In the minds of the test participants, what reason would the researchers have to lie to them about something as trivial as broken glass?

Perhaps more interesting than the simple false memories are the ones Loftus calls “rich false memories,” which are defined as “experiences about which a person can feel confident, provide details, even express emotion about made-up events that never happened.” These better conform to Loftus’ conclusions, but I would still argue that the memories are not entirely fabricated. The test participants probably have an emotional response to some real-life or fictional (as in a movie or television program) event which fits the description of the suggested real-world events. As for the “lost-in-the-mall” scenario, perhaps they had a friend who experienced something along those lines, or witnessed a similar event happening to a different child when they were at about the right age. Maybe they even recall watching something like it in a favorite television show. I understand that the chances are slim, but I would suggest that these memories they invent about themselves are actually their mind projecting feelings of empathy onto another personage, real and remembered or fictional altogether. This connection, while insubstantial, could trigger the reported emotional response.

Lastly, there is the example of Alan Alda’s refusal to consume hard-boiled eggs after being informed they’d once made him violently ill. I would side with Alda here, arguing that even if he couldn’t remember an event within which eggs sickened him, there really was no reason to take the chance and eat them anyway while on the picnic. While Loftus asserts that his aversion to the eggs proves he invented a memory about his fictional bad experience, I maintain that Alda simply didn’t want to take his chances whether he believed the tale about himself or not. If someone told you that spinach had once given you a terrible case of food poisoning, and then later that day you were offered some, I can hardly believe you’d feel comfortable eating it, regardless of whether or not you remembered becoming ill from spinach. The same, I assume, goes for Alan Alda and the hard-boiled eggs—they’re just not delicious enough to justify taking the chance.

In short, I contend that, while interesting, Loftus’ studies prove nothing more than that, when informed by an assumed intellectual authority of an untruth, people will adapt their truths—subconsciously or otherwise—to accommodate the new misinformation. Loftus’ experiments weren’t really exercises in memory, but rather in the gullibility of and intellectual submission exhibited by her test subjects.