Describe Elizabeth Loftus’s research and what it suggests about the accuracy of memory

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
?Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has spent a good part of her career showing that eyewitness memory can be manipulated by the expectations we hold about the world. For example, in one experiment (Loftus & Palmer, 1974), Loftus showed participants a film of a car accident. After viewing the film, the participants were randomly divided into several groups and questioned about their memory of the film. In one group, the participants were asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” In another group, the participants were asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” In the control group, the participants were not asked to estimate the speed of the cars. The results showed that the verb used in the question affected participants’ estimates of the speed of the cars. Participants in the “smashed into” group estimated the speed of the cars, on average, at 41 mph; the average estimate for participants in the “hit” group was 34 mph. The participants exhibited the misinformation effect, or the distortion of memory that occurs when people are exposed to misinformation. In this case, the words smashed and hit activated different expectations that were used to fill in the missing details in the participants’ memories of the film, and the result was that they remembered the film differently. Imagine how a lawyer’s choice of words might influence a witness’s memory on the witness stand.
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Even more dramatic is the fact that our memories can be permanently altered by things that happen after we encode the memories. In another study (Loftus & Zanni, 1975), Loftus showed participants a film of a car crash and then asked them a series of questions about the accident. The participants in one group were asked, “Did you see a broken headlight?” In a second group, the participants were asked, “Did you see the broken headlight?” Although there had been no broken headlight in the film, of those who were asked about a broken headlight, 7% reported that they had seen a broken headlight in the film. Of the participants who were asked about the broken headlight, 17% said they had seen it. By subtly suggesting to these participants that there had been a broken headlight, Loftus caused more of them to remember seeing something that they had not seen. She created a false memory in her participants.