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Gary
Wells: Studies in eyewitness misidentidication | RCMP
confession tricks in Australia | Alain
Andre | Father Paul Shanley
| Michael Jackson
| Richard McNally |
Polygraph: Mikai |
Elizabeth Loftus
Experts say false confessions
come from leading questions, young suspects, high-pressure interrogations
(Continued from Richard
Leo page)
"Hawaii? You want me in
Hawaii?"
The nation's most sought-after
courtroom expert on eyewitness memory silently ponders a quick
trip to the 50th state, the suggestion rendering her momentarily
speechless - which is not the usual state of affairs for Beth
Loftus. But this offer is unexpectedly alluring, dangled before
her by an eager defense attorney calling from Honolulu: Could
she please take a quick summer trip to paradise to testify in
a murder case?
She gets at least one such
call a day, a deluge that has put her on the stand more than
250 times in her career. She's just back from a homicide case
against a cop in Phoenix, and she'll soon head to Boston, where
she'll analyze the "recovered" memories of people who
have, after many years, remembered being abused as children by
Catholic priests. There's no time for more trips, even to Hawaii.
"No," Loftus finally
tells her crestfallen caller, stifling a sigh. "I just can't
do it."
Loftus is in demand for a simple
reason: The 59-year-old psychologist is the ultimate memory detective.
For the last quarter-century,
she has hunted the sources and causes of false memories and revealed
just how easily our remembrance can be manipulated. In Loftus'
memory lab, people recall events that did not occur, recognize
strangers as familiar faces, and recount in sensory detail experiences
that they have never had.
In an experiment for a recent
PBS documentary, Loftus and her team persuaded actor Alan Alda
that eating a hardboiled egg may have made him sick during a
picnic when he was a child - something he had previously insisted
never happened.
All it takes is a suggestive
or misleading question from an incompetent or devious interrogator,
and an entire memory can change without a person even knowing
it, Loftus has found. The implications of her research have been
profound, for when false memories involve more than picnic lunches
and party encounters, when they influence crime witnesses, victims
and suspects, then liberty, life and the integrity of the justice
system are at stake. In ways no one ever expected but which are
now the basis of countless research projects, Loftus' work has
permanently altered the way our recollections are treated in
court.
Elected this year to the prestigious
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Loftus is one of the 25
most cited psychologists in scientific literature. To say her
arrival was a coup for the university, says Leo, who helped recruit
her and whose own research is based in part on her discoveries,
is an understatement.
"Beth Loftus is not just
a pioneer. She is the pioneer in the field of eyewitness testimony
and memory," says Steven Clarke, chairman of the law and
psychology program at UC Riverside. "Beth Loftus was the
first to develop the scientific methodology to study the memory
of eyewitnesses. ... She's a magnet for talent. She has catapulted
UCI to the top in law and psychology."
Over the course of her career,
Loftus' work shattered the once widely held notion that the brain
stores memory like some sort of organic computer, an analogy
she has disproved in a series of clever experiments that showed
just how easy it is to influence, contaminate and manipulate
what people remember. She proved that leading questions, even
seemingly innocuous ones, could contaminate and alter memories
of complex events.
She began experimenting early
on with witnesses' memories of car accidents - showing them recreations
or videos of collisions, then questioning them. She found that
even varying simple descriptive terms in questions - asking,
for example, how fast the cars were traveling when they smashed
one another versus when they hit one another - had profound consequences.
People in the "smashed"
group tended to remember higher speeds than the "hit"
group, and to claim more often that they saw glass breaking during
the accident, although there had been no broken glass.
The results were even more
dramatic when she experimented with offering outright misleading
information to witnesses, such as suggesting there was a yield
sign at the scene of a collision when there was actually a stop
sign. Those who received the misleading information more often
remembered the signs incorrectly than those who were questioned
in a neutral way.
Blame for an accident could
be shifted, Loftus discovered, just by asking questions in a
certain way. And the resulting false memories were not necessarily
uncertain - many people recalled them with conviction, even emotion,
just as if they were genuine experiences.
In a series of follow-up experiments,
she demonstrated what would later be called the "Lost in
the Mall Effect," finding that, on average, as many as one
in four people can be convinced through suggestive questioning
that they experienced all sorts of traumatic events that never
occurred - getting lost in the mall as a child and becoming terrified;
witnessing demonic possessions; getting bitten by an animal.
The test subjects often went
on to add their own rich, detailed accounts of these non-existent
events that they now adamantly believed to be true: fictional
rescuers, fictional medical treatment, fictional joyous returns
home.
Even visceral, primal memories
are not sacrosanct in Loftus' Memory Lab, where she experiments
on implanting false food memories as the ultimate dieting tool.
"Just think of what we could do for people who need to diet
if they could be persuaded to remember that they dislike fattening
foods." she says.
Her work, along with that of
other like-minded researchers, proved critical to debunking the
mass child-abuse cases that sprang up around the country in the
1980s, including the McMartin preschool case and dozens like
it from Bakersfield to Boston. Loftus, Leo and others have found
that children are especially vulnerable to having their memories
altered by leading questions.
Although prosecutors have sometimes
criticized and grilled her, and some experts have tried to cast
doubt on her lab work by asserting that it exaggerates memory
problems in the "real world," the science behind Loftus'
conclusions about eyewitness memory is widely accepted. She says
she never felt particularly controversial - until she began about
10 years ago to take on what she derisively calls "the recovered-memory
crowd."
"That's when all hell
broke loose," she says.
When a series of spectacular
and emotionally charged cases began cropping up in the `90s based
on the theory of "repressed" and "recovered"
memories of past traumas and abuse, Loftus discerned a pattern:
The long-lost memories were almost always revealed during sessions
with therapists who were already inclined to believe in repressed
memories as a cause of depression, bulimia and a host of other
disorders. Not only did she find the scientific basis for this
dubious, Loftus also came to believe that many "recovered"
memories could be attributed to therapists who inadvertently
used suggestive techniques with their patients.
"Except people were being
sent to prison this time," she says.
Her work helped free George
Franklin of San Mateo, Calif., perhaps the most widely publicized
recovered-memory defendant, who was convicted of murder after
his adult daughter recalled during therapy that she had witnessed
him kill her best friend when she was 6 years old, more than
two decades earlier. Franklin served five years in prison before
successfully appealing.
Loftus' testimony on behalf
of Napa winery executive Gary Ramona, accused of abusing his
daughter many years after the fact, helped him successfully sue
his daughter's Irvine, Calif., therapist, then persuade a jury
that the "recovered" memories that destroyed his career
and marriage had been created in the therapist's office.
Most recently, Loftus has gotten
involved in the defense of the Archdiocese of Boston and Father
Paul Shanley in cases arising from recovered memories of sexual
abuse. The district attorney in Boston recently dropped charges
involving two of the alleged victims, whose memories seemed most
subject to Loftus-style challenge.
But psychologists remain somewhat
divided on the validity of recovered memories, and Loftus has
aroused the ire of true-believers, particularly those who consider
themselves victims of long-past abuse - which is why she has
been swatted with a newspaper by a fellow air passenger, and
why a man spoke at a conference on repressed memory not long
ago about longing to slash Loftus' tires.
Indeed, UCI owes Loftus' presence
at the Irvine campus to a controversial repressed-memory case.
While at the University of
Washington, Loftus raised doubts about a therapist's claims that
he had videotaped a woman in the act of recovering a memory of
child abuse. The patient on the video, which was shown by her
therapist at conferences nationwide, complained that Loftus had
violated her privacy by attempting to investigate the claims.
Loftus had been a faculty member
for 29 years at Washington, yet she recalls with undisguised
bitterness that, following this complaint, university officials
arrived at her office and seized her files with 15 minutes' notice,
ordered her not to speak about the case and began an investigation
that lasted 19 months. She finally was exonerated by the university,
she says, but racked up $30,000 in legal fees in the process,
then was sued by the patient when she and another psychologist
published an account of their work on the case (without ever
publicly identifying the patient). The lawsuit is pending.
Leo heard about the controversy
and suggested UCI's School of Social Ecology make Loftus an offer.
His own research on false confessions has repeatedly turned up
impressionable people who come to "remember" perpetrating
crimes they didn't commit. He told her he felt UCI supported
professors whose findings challenged conventional thinking -
something he had experienced when his work came under fire for
freeing people from prison.
Loftus accepted UCI's offer
of a titled professorship and the chance to work for what she
calls "the best law and psychology department in the country."
Now Loftus sees a "critical
mass" forming at UCI, and though she hesitates to suggest
her arrival was the catalyst for this, the evidence of her influence
is hard to miss.
Down the hall, Assistant Professor
Jodi Quas attacks the question of witness reliability from another
angle: Her work is geared toward finding ways to make witness
memory more reliable, particularly in young children, by scrupulously
avoiding the "Lost in the Mall" questioning techniques.
Quas is working with juvenile justice authorities in Los Angeles
and elsewhere to help young children testify truthfully and to
help police officers and social workers question them in a neutral
way.
Two other young researchers
drawn to the UCI law and psychology group this fall also are
shaking conventional views on kids and the legal system. Elizabeth
Cauffman of the University of Pittsburgh and Jennifer Skeem of
the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, are studying the reliability
of a checklist many juvenile courts use to identify young sociopaths.
Judges and juvenile social
workers have been desperate for a tool to help determine which
kids can benefit from treatment and which should just be locked
away, and the checklist has seemed to fit the bill. But Skeem
and Cauffman are finding that it could easily mistake normal
teen problems for adult-style sociopathy. If the checklist isn't
working as intended, Cauffman and Skeem say, then kids who can
be saved are, literally, being thrown away.
The growing reputation of the
law and psychology faculty at UCI has led to an increase in the
number of students applying to the university's School of Social
Ecology, as well as an influx of grants to keep the research
going. "We're like kids at the playground," says Loftus.
"This is the place to be."
Richard Leo's work seems to
tie together the varied threads of the work of the psychology
and law researchers at UCI. His views on false confessions and
their causes combine theories about altered memories, suggestive
questioning, the effects of stress and trauma on kids, and the
way the legal system treats the young and the mentally unstable.
Leo and his mentor, UC Berkeley
Professor Richard Ofshe, have done some of the world's most oft-cited
research on the false-confession phenomenon. Along the way, Leo,
40, has consulted on more than 500 criminal cases and testified
in more than 100, primarily for the defense. (He also has done
training for the Miami Police Department and other law-enforcement
organizations.)
Interest in false confessions
came accidentally for Leo: While an undergrad at Berkeley in
1984, a student in his class was grilled by police for 16 hours
in a murder case. The young man ended up confessing to killing
his girlfriend.
No physical evidence pointed
to Bradley Paige as the killer of Berkeley student Bibi Lee,
who was found dead on a hiking trail, her skull badly fractured.
The police zeroed in on him out of habit: Statistically, most
murdered women are killed by their husbands or boyfriends.
The account of the crime police
extracted from him did not match the evidence at the murder scene
- although it did match preliminary information the interrogators
had in hand about the girl's death, information that proved to
be wrong. In later years, Leo would show how this sort of flaw
can be a prime indicator of a false confession, evidence that
the police, not the suspect, provided the story line.
But at the time, confessions
were rarely attacked in court, and such fine points seemed like
nitpicking. He said he did it, the prosecutor argued, so what
else did one need to know? Page was convicted of manslaughter
and sentenced to six years in prison - a conviction that has
stood despite compelling evidence uncovered later implicating
a convicted serial killer seen in the vicinity of Bibi Lee's
murder.
The case, and particularly
the tactics of the police and the discrepancies between the confession
and the crime, left a deep impression on Leo. Such cases have
been the subject of his research ever since.
Leo does not design and perform
experiments as Loftus does, but instead uses real-world criminal
cases to study confessions and interrogation techniques, making
detailed comparisons between accounts of crimes given by "confessed"
criminals and the objective facts uncovered by forensic investigations
and eyewitness interviews. Confessions are such powerful evidence
that police, prosecutors and juries will often overlook irrefutable
evidence of innocence - somebody else's DNA or fingerprints at
the crime scene - rather than disregard the confession, Leo has
found.
One particularly tough case
for him was in Stanislaus County, Calif., last fall, when Joseph
Alan McCarty was convicted of manslaughter for killing his best
friend's mother. Leo was called to the stand in the case to testify
about techniques police use to extract confessions, and how they
can lead to false admissions, particularly with young and impressionable
people under stress. McCarty was 20 at the time. But Leo was
barred from saying outright that McCarty's confession was, in
his opinion, false.
The jury foreman would later
say he and his fellow jurors, while convicting McCarty, found
Leo "completely credible," but that they ended up believing
the confession was legitimate in this case. The jury never knew
what Leo and everyone else in the courtroom knew: McCarty had
passed a polygraph test in which he denied responsibility for
the murder. That test, like Leo's opinion, was legally inadmissible.
"It is depressing at times,"
says Leo. "False confessions have led to more wrongful convictions
than any other single type of evidence."
Leo helped reach a happier
outcome two years ago in Wenatchee, Wash., where a modern-day
witch-hunt for child molesters led to the arrest of 43 residents
accused of abusing 60 children. Nearly 30,000 criminal charges
were filed before the case began to unravel, as allegations of
police misconduct, threats and coercion of suspects and child
witnesses - including the lead investigator's own foster daughter
- began to surface.
But by that point, more than
a dozen indigent and developmentally disabled defendants had
been persuaded to confess and plead guilty.
Leo strives to avoid emotional
involvement in the cases he studies, but he was infuriated by
the Wenatchee case, and he felt compelled to get involved. Leo's
work proved pivotal in freeing several of the accused (as did
the work of Loftus, who also took on several Wenatchee cases).
In one case, Leo was able to show how Doris Green, a mother of
four, had been coerced and threatened into confessing. She was
freed after serving four years of a 23-year prison sentence.
This spring, Leo and a co-author
published a study that uncovered 125 false confessions that occurred
in five years, in which DNA or other conclusive evidence subsequently
proved the confessed criminals innocent. These were not cases
in which innocence was possible or likely, but absolutely certain
- confessed "criminals" who had done nothing more than
walk into an interrogation room.
Among Leo's most provocative
findings:
False confessions are most
common in murder cases, where the pressure is greatest to make
an arrest. The high stakes of such cases do not make the police
more careful about avoiding false confessions - just the opposite.
A third of false confessions
come from juveniles, "the most vulnerable" to police
pressure, says Leo.
The average interrogation in
the 125 false confession cases lasted more than 16 hours, compared
to a typical police interrogation, which averages less than two
hours.
Almost 60 percent of the false
confession cases studied were dropped by police or prosecutors
before trial. But of those false confession cases that went to
trial, 81 percent ended with a conviction - with nine receiving
death sentences.
Most of the false confessions
would not have been revealed without the advent of modern DNA
testing - innocents would remain in prison, or face execution.
---
The Stephanie Crowe murder
investigation in Escondido illustrated all of these factors in
a single case: juveniles accused of murder, high pressure on
the police to solve a sensational crime, marathon interrogation
sessions, and a case that entered jury selection before it was
abruptly dropped because DNA evidence pointed to an entirely
different killer.
Leo says it was his most memorable
and disturbing case by far. He interrupted his yearlong book-writing
sabbatical so he could testify in the case this past spring.
Part of Leo's work required
him to view the 40-plus hours of interrogation tapes in the case.
They are painful to watch - no parent would willingly allow their
child to be subjected to the crushing pressure exerted on the
three boys by the police. But the parents had no choice. They
were kept away, with the Crowes threatened with arrest and with
losing custody of their youngest daughter even as they mourned
Stephanie's death.
In the videos shot inside the
Escondido Police interrogation room, 14-year-old Michael writhes,
screams, sobs, appears to nearly choke, and begs the police to
please, please stop. He bangs his head against the wall and cries
out, "Oh, God, oh God, no." He curls into an upright
fetal position and says over and over that he could not possibly
have killed his sister, that he would remember it if he had.
But the detectives are relentless.
They lie to him, they claim
a voice stress analyzer reveals him as a killer, they say blood
and other evidence link him and his friends irrefutably to the
crime. They imply prison and rape by older inmates will be inevitable
unless he confesses and gets help. And, finally, Michael cracks.
"As one watches Michael
Crowe's deep and anguished cries as he is told, repeatedly, and
comes to believe, that he killed his sister without any knowledge
or memory of doing so, one sees the picture of psychological
torture," Leo later wrote in a report to Crowe's lawyer.
"In my professional opinion, the interrogations of Michael
Crowe were psychologically brutal, coercive and highly improper."
As so often happens with impressionable
and young suspects, Leo says, Michael reached a point where he
began to say whatever the detectives wanted to hear - anything
to make the interrogation end. He begins to express doubts about
his own mind and memory, the detectives having convinced him
that there is a mountain of evidence against him. At last he
says on the tape that he may have done it without really remembering
it.
The detectives declared this
a triumph and called Michael Crowe's words an admission of guilt.
Leo calls it a "coerced-persuaded" confession - when
the confessor doubts his own memory and makes an admission based
on the "facts" the police give him. The only real evidence
in the case against Crowe was this confession, a similar one
from one friend and incriminating statements from another.
The detectives' failure to
give Miranda warnings eliminated some of this taped evidence,
and the rest of the case evaporated as trial was about to begin.
It turned out that the Escondido Police had in their possession
for months a shirt seized from a 34-year-old schizophrenic transient,
Richard Tuite, who witnesses saw in the neighborhood on the afternoon
and evening of the murder. Police discounted him as a suspect
as they focused solely on Stephanie's brother and his two friends.
At the insistence of defense
attorneys, an independent lab finally examined Tuite's shirt.
DNA tests identified Stephanie's blood spattered on the cloth.
The police had the key to the case in their possession all along.
As for the hairs on Stephanie's
hands that seemed so suspicious to detectives: They were stray
hairs the girl probably picked it up from the carpet while trying
to crawl out of her room.
In the wake of the DNA evidence,
the San Diego district attorney dropped the case against Michael
Crowe and his friends but refused to charge Tuite, saying prosecutors
still believed a case could be re-filed against the boys. Leo
says the power of the confession evidence swayed the authorities
as they began to search for some theory that could put the boys
and Tuite together - even though none of the confessions mentioned
a transient.
The Escondido police have never
publicly apologized nor retreated from their belief in the boys'
guilt, and the city has succeeded in winning dismissal of most,
though not all, of a federal lawsuit filed by the boys' family.
Police officials routinely
decline comment on the case, but several of the original detectives
served as consultants for a true-crime book that suggested the
boys were more likely Stephanie's killers than Tuite. But a new
investigation by the San Diego Sheriff's Department placed blame
squarely on Tuite.
The state attorney general
took over the case, filing murder charges and calling on Leo
as an expert witness to explain why the boys' confessions could
not be believed. "It is ... one of the most egregious examples
of inept and improper questioning I have ever seen," Leo
testified.
Escondido detectives testified
for the defense and in support of the confessions.
In May, six years after Stephanie
died and long after the three boys on the confession videotape
had become young men, jurors rejected the confessions and the
detectives who extracted them, and voted to convict Tuite of
voluntary manslaughter - a verdict both Leo and the Crowe family
view as a form of vindication. Tuite received a maximum sentence
of 13 years in prison in August, and faces additional time for
briefly escaping custody during jury selection.
The attorney general's office
was so impressed with Leo that they want him back to do training
for their office about false confessions. "He's normally
a defense witness, of course," says Deputy Attorney General
Jim Dutton, a prosecutor on the Tuite case. "But he's the
kind of witness who says the same thing no matter what side calls
him. ... Our job is to get it right, not just win a case. If
there's a false confession, we want to know it."
If there's a common goal for
the researchers in psychology and the law at UCI, they say it's
not what some in law enforcement tend to imagine: that they're
out to prove America is overrun by rogue cops and bullying prosecutors.
Rather, their findings suggest that injustices tend to arise
from the best, not the worst, of intentions, from genuine - if
misguided - desire to protect the public, from conventional wisdom
that is anything but wise, and from good-faith beliefs that are,
nevertheless, as false as the memories they can generate.
The power and continuing impact
of their work is not simply a mater of pointing out how the authorities
can get it wrong, say memory researchers. It's in helping the
authorities get it right.
---
© 2004, The Orange
County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).
False memories can be
planted under interrogation, according to US scientists
By Steve Connor ,18 February
2003, Independent
News
Scientists have planted false
memories into people's minds in a study that demonstrates just
how easy it is to for police to convince people they have witnessed
something that did not actually happen.
More than a third of people
are susceptible to false memories, according to studies by Elizabeth
Loftus, professor of psychology at the University of California.
Her experiments could explain why so many people in Washington
DC said they saw a white van near to the scene of last year's
sniper shootings. In fact, the snipers used a dark Chevrolet
Caprice and no white van was involved.
"Where did that white
van come from? It came from the fact that someonetalked to the
media and suddenly the whole country is looking for a white van
that perhaps did not exist," she said.
In one study, Professor Loftus
implanted a false memory in the minds of volunteers who had visited
Disneyland as children. "We have tried to come up with ways
of planting memories that could not have happened. We try to
make people believe that when they went to Disneyland they managed
to shake hands with Bugs Bunny.
"Bugs could never have
been at Disneyland because he is a Warner Bros character. Yet
we've found a way of getting 36 per cent of our subjects to tell
us they shook hands with Bugs.
"There are some methods
of interrogation that are unwittingly or even deliberately suggestive.
But there are some situations where law enforcement agencies
essentially lie to people that they are interviewing. They say
things like 'another witness claims to have seen you there' ...
some sort of lies that they think will lead to a confession,"
she said.
6 stories including
AP, UPI, and Scripps Howard. Besides Loftus' work there are good
mentions of McNally's work.
Excerpts
A US study indicates that it
can be easy to induce false memories in the minds of some people.
Scientists at the University of California found they could plant
memories in more than a third of volunteers. Psychologist Elizabeth
Loftus says the finding demonstrates that people such as police
interrogators and those investigating sexual-abuse allegations
must be careful not to make suggestions to their subjects.
Loftus is one of the country's
most controversial memory researchers. She frequently draws harsh
criticism from victims' advocates, attorneys and other scientists.
Over 25 years, she has examined
more than 20,000 subjects and written 19 books. She appears frequently
in court as an expert witness.
While some recovered memories
turn out to be true, Loftus says her experiments repeatedly show
that memories are fragile possessions that are easily manipulated.
But she does not condemn her subjects for being gullible.
Of adopting false memories,
she said: "This behavior is entirely normal."
* * * Loftus' work has implications
in criminal cases in which childhood memories of supposed sexual
abuse and other crimes crop up decades later, and in situations
where memory distortion comes into play, such as in the recent
sniper attacks around Washington, D.C.
"Give me enough time with
somebody, and I'll make them believe in just about everything,"
Loftus said. If that sounds worrisome, she said it's better to
understand the truth about the human mind "so you know how
to defend against it."
* * * A controversial practice
in which psychologists try to recover repressed memories of childhood
sexual abuse also got attention at the session. In some cases,
psychologists may actually create in their patients memories
of childhood events that never occurred. Innocent people can
be prosecuted and jailed as a result.
Loftus described planting false
memories in more than 20,000 research volunteers. They included
recollections of accidents, leisure time activities, childhood
trauma and other events that never occurred.
* * * Loftus said although
fewer than half the subjects in her studies displayed false memories,
she argued the effect can be quite persuasive -- even if it is
to the subject's detriment. She cited instances in which police
interrogators will lie to suspects and cause them to confess
to crimes they did not commit.
The false-memory effect can
be widespread -- to the point of mass hysteria -- Loftus noted,
as in last fall's sniper incidents in Washington, D.C., in which
"there was the case of the white van that everyone was searching
for that did not exist."
* * * "Memory is highly
susceptible to distortion and contamination," said University
of California-Irvine cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus,
a pioneer in false memory research. The sniper attacks around
Washington, D.C., last fall, when scores of witnesses became
convinced they had seen a white van or panel truck near a shooting
scene is just one of the latest notable examples of how eyewitness
accounts can prove inaccurate, she said.
Her three decades of research
have shown that people can be led to remember rather familiar
or common experiences, even when those experiences likely had
not occurred, she said.
Much of Loftus's work has focused
on false claims of repressed memories of sexual abuse.
Health Media Group Media
Watch Services February 17, 2003 Health Media Group Media Watch
Services
Warning on false memory
CNN Online 17/02/03 Health
Newswire reporters
A US study indicates that it
can be easy to induce false memories in the minds of some people.
Scientists at the University of California found they could plant
memories in more than a third of volunteers. Psychologist Elizabeth
Loftus says the finding demonstrates that people such as police
interrogators and those investigating sexual-abuse allegations
must be careful not to make suggestions to their subjects.
Researchers find it's
easy to plant false memories in minds of some people
JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, The
Associated Press Science Writer, February 16, 2003,
DENVER
- Remember that wonderful
day when Bugs Bunny hugged you at Disneyland? A study presented
Sunday shows just how easy it can be to induce false memories
in the minds of some people.
More than a third of subjects
in the study recalled that theme-park moment - impossible because
Bugs is not a Disney character - after a researcher planted the
false memory.
Other research, of people who
believed they were abducted by space aliens, shows that even
false memories can be as intensely felt as those of real-life
victims of war and other violence. The research demonstrates
that police interrogators and people investigating sexual-abuse
allegations must be careful not to plant suggestions into their
subjects, said University of California-Irvine psychologist Elizabeth
Loftus. She presented preliminary results of recent false memory
experiments Sunday at the national meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science.
Loftus said some people may
be so suggestible that they could be convinced they were responsible
for crimes they didn't commit. In interrogations, "much
of what goes on - unwittingly - is contamination," she said.
The news media's power of suggestion
also can leave a false impression, Loftus said.
"During the Washington
sniper attacks, everyone reported seeing a white van," she
said. "Where did it come from? The whole country was seeing
white vans."
Loftus is one of the country's
most controversial memory researchers. She frequently draws harsh
criticism from victims' advocates, attorneys and other scientists.
Over 25 years, she has examined
more than 20,000 subjects and written 19 books. She appears frequently
in court as an expert witness.
While some recovered memories
turn out to be true, Loftus says her experiments repeatedly show
that memories are fragile possessions that are easily manipulated.
But she does not condemn her subjects for being gullible.
Of adopting false memories,
she said: "This behavior is entirely normal."
A key, researchers said, is
to add elements of touch, taste, sound and smell to the story.
In the Bugs Bunny study, Loftus
talked with subjects about their childhoods and asked not only
whether they saw someone dressed up as the character, but also
whether they hugged his furry body and stroked his velvety ears.
In subsequent interviews, 36 percent of the subjects recalled
the cartoon rabbit.
In another study, Loftus suggested
frog-kissing incidents that 15 percent of the group later recalled.
"It is sensory details
that people use to distinguish their memories," said Loftus.
"If you imbue the story with them, you'll disrupt this memory
process. It's almost a recipe to get people to remember things
that aren't true."
In other research presented
Sunday, Harvard University psychologist Richard McNally tested
10 people who said they had been abducted, physically examined
and sexually molested by space aliens.
Researchers tape-recorded the
subjects talking about their memories. When the recordings were
played back later, the purported abductees perspired and their
heart rates jumped.
McNally said three of the 10
subjects showed physical reactions "at least as great"
as people suffering post traumatic stress disorder from war,
crime, rape and other violent incidents.
"This underscores the
power of emotional belief," McNally said.
Memories Made to Order
at UCI; With manipulation, people an 'recall' what they're led
to, researchers find.
Jeff Gottlieb, Los Angeles
Times Staff Writer, February 17, 2003 Monday Orange County Edition
With a little ingenuity and
the powr of suggestion, it really is possible to make people
believe the impobable -- that they kissed a frog or shook hands
with Bugs Bunny at isneyland. The findings are among the latest
work on false memories by UC Irvine cognitive psychologist Elizabeth
Loftus and her researchers. They were resented Sunday in Denver
at the annual meeting of the American Assn. or the Advancement
of Science. Loftus' work has implications in criminal cases in
which childhood memories of supposed sexual abuse and other crimes
crop up decades later, and in situations where memory distortion
comes into play, such is in the recent sniper attacks around
Washington, D.C. "Give me enough time with somebody, and
I'll make them believe in just about everything," Loftus
said. If that sounds worrisome, she said it's better to understand
the truth about the human mind "so you know how to defend
against it."
Loftus came to UC Irvine as
a professor of psychology and criminology this year after 29
years at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has been
an expert witness or consultant in a number of high-profile trials,
including the McMartin Preschool molestation case, the Hillside
Strangler case, the Rodney King beating and the Bosnian war trials.
Loftus presented the results
of three experiments, all involving planting false memories.
In one study, undertaken with
one of her researchers, interviewers in Russia were able to convince
12.5% of their subjects that they had seen a wounded animal in
media coverage of two terrorist bombings in Moscow that killed
233 people in September 1999.
The people were first interviewed
in March 2002. They were interviewed again six months later and
told that they had mentioned a wounded animal in their first
interview. They were asked to describe it.
One person described a parrot
in a cage. Another described a dog barking and racing around
police officers. Another talked of a bleeding cat lying on a
desk.
One problem: They all made
it up. No wounded animals were shown on TV or in newspaper or
magazine coverage of the incident.
"There are a lot of studies
now of the aftermath of 9/11," Loftus said. "What are
people going to remember? The bottom line is: It shows you can
take an event that is very traumatic to people and tamper with
it."
A study of University of Washington
students last year illustrated ways in which ideas can be planted
in people's memories. Subjects were asked to study a made-up
advertisement describing meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.
People later said that when
they had visited the Anaheim amusement park as children, they
had shaken hands with Bugs, hugged him and touched his tail.
Some even recalled the character uttering his signature "What's
up, doc?"
The percentages varied, depending
on the number of times people were exposed to the ad and other
factors. In one study, though, 46% of those who claimed to have
met Bugs said they shook his hand.
One problem: Since the rascally
rabbit is a Warner Bros. character, he would never have been
at the Disney attraction.
"Clearly these are impossible
memories, and no one can say we revived true memories,"
Loftus said.
In another 2002 experiment
by Loftus' doctoral student Ayanna Thomas, University of Washington
students were told to imagine the color of a frog, and how it
would feel on their lips. Subjects were told to imagine other
activities, such as crushing a Hershey's kiss with a dental floss
container. Two weeks later, they were asked to recall what they
had done on that previous day.
Fifteen percent claimed they
actually had kissed a frog or smashed a chocolate. Though the
percentage is not large, Loftus said, it was significant that
people were willing to say they did something bizarre and improbable
when they did not.
What's at work, said the memory
specialist, is that people are first persuaded a thing is plausible.
In the Bugs Bunny experiment, for example, people saw a realistic
advertisement.
"People think, 'If it's
part of an advertisement, it must be true,' " she said.
Next, people are asked about
their own experiences in such a way as to suggest that the same
thing happened to them.
They are asked to imagine how
something might smell, look or feel, for example, kissing a frog.
"Then what you have is
an experience that feels like a memory," Loftus said.
Witnesses can be reliable if
their recollections are not distorted or contaminated, but the
research suggests people can be persuaded to interpret events
in new ways.
And it can happen to an entire
population, as shown by public reaction to the October sniper
shootings that panicked Washington and suburban Virginia and
Maryland for three weeks.
"Suddenly, everybody is
out there seeing white vans, looking for white vans," Loftus
said. "My suggestion is that because somebody talked about
a white van in the media, people became unwitting subjects in
some mass memory distortion experiment. In the end, [the pair
arrested] had a blue Caprice."
TRICKS ON BRAIN COULD
HAVE LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS IT'S EASY TO PLANT FALSE MEMORIES, STUDY
FINDS
MICHAEL WOODS, POST-GAZETTE
NATIONAL BUREAU, February 17, 2003
DENVER
- Everything you remember
from last week may not be real, a panel of scientific experts
cautioned yesterday.
That is because the human brain
is frighteningly susceptible to suggestive comments, subliminal
messages and other tricks that can form false memories.
Among the brain's memory scams
is a strange but surprisingly common phenomenon called sleep
paralysis. Scientists identified it as the likely explanation
in people claiming they've been abducted and molested by space
aliens. Research spanning 20 years has given us almost a recipe
for planting and embellishing false memories in people, said
Elizabeth F. Loftus, a professor of psychology and criminology
at the University of California at Irvine. This has serious implications
for false memory problems that are occurring in society, which
are really memory distortion episodes, she said.
Loftus and other experts on
false memories, who spoke at a meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, cited several concerns. Police
interrogation practices, for instance, may intentionally or unwittingly
plant false memories in suspects or witnesses, they said, and
embellish the memories with life-like detail.
A controversial practice in
which psychologists try to recover repressed memories of childhood
sexual abuse also got attention at the session. In some cases,
psychologists may actually create in their patients memories
of childhood events that never occurred. Innocent people can
be prosecuted and jailed as a result.
Loftus described planting false
memories in more than 20,000 research volunteers. They included
recollections of accidents, leisure time activities, childhood
trauma and other events that never occurred.
More than a third of subjects
in the study recalled being hugged by Bugs Bunny at Disneyland--
impossible because Bugs is not a Disney character -- after a
researcher planted the false memory.
Research has shown that it
is possible to do more just than change a detail or two in a
memory, Loftus said. Totally false memories of events that never
occurred can be planted intentionally or unintentionally. The
process involves, in part, making a person believe that an event
could have happened, and suggesting that it could have happened
to them even if they don't remember it.
Loftus proposed establishing
a National Memory Safety Board. A counterpart to the National
Transportation Safety Board, it would investigate memory problems
that led to injustices in the legal system.
Harvard University's Richard
J. McNally described research on another memory trick now believed
to be the basis of alien abduction stories. People who claim
to have been abducted by space aliens are not mentally ill, he
said, citing numerous studies. Rather, they probably are victims
of sleep paralysis, a condition that occurs when people who are
awaken from deep sleep are only partially conscious of their
surroundings and can't move. About one in three people have experienced
it, he said, with one in 20 having a severe form accompanied
by hallucinations. Some involve otherworldly sensations that
can be mistaken for alien encounters, he said.
Michael Woods can be reached
at mwoods@nationalpress.com or 1-202-662-7072. The Associated
Press contributed to this report.
False memories easy to
foster in witnesses
By HARVEY BLACK, United
Press International February 17, 2003
Memories can be vivid, emotionally
powerful, realistic -- and completely false, researchers reported
late Sunday.
The findings could have important
implications for evidence presented in court that is based on
the testimony of witnesses.
Elizabeth Loftus, professor
of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, described
studies in which more than one-third of the subjects could be
persuaded they had experiences that turned out to be demonstrably
false. At a news briefing at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Loftus detailed one
study in which college students reviewed several "ads"
for Disneyland that featuring Bugs Bunny -- a Warner Brothers
cartoon character with no connection to the amusement park.
Afterward, when the students
were asked questions about childhood visits they made to Disneyland,
36 percent responded they had met Bugs Bunny there, Loftus reported.
"Many of them described
detailed experiences with Bugs, a memory that has to be impossible,"
she told reporters.
Loftus also found subjects'
memories surrounding traumatic events could be manipulated. She
and colleagues in Russia documented how approximately 12 percent
of study subjects there could be manipulated by interviewers.
The subjects later described specific false details -- planted
by the interviewers -- about news events, such as a 1999 terrorist
bombing in Moscow that killed more than 200 people, and the World
Trade Center attack.
The vividness of false memories
also can produce intense physiological symptoms similar to Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder when relived, said Richard McNally,
a psychology professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
McNally said he had 10 individuals,
all of whom had claimed to be abducted by aliens, listen to tape
recordings of their previous descriptions of the experience.
He found their heart rates, levels of sweating and other measures
of emotional response paralleled those of individuals who actually
had experienced traumatic events in their lives and who listened
to their own tape recordings of those experiences.
"If you genuinely believe
you've been traumatized, you'll show the same physiological reactions
as people who have PTSD," McNally said, adding the individuals
who claimed to be abducted showed no signs of mental illness.
He said such persons tended
to be interested in so-called New Age beliefs, such as tarot
cards and channeling. They also tended to fantasize and experience
hypnopompic hallucinations, in which subjects think they have
been awakened while dreaming.
Although his research did not
deal directly with memory, Joel Weinberger, professor of psychology
at Adelphi University in New York, said the controversial practice
of flashing subliminal messages on a television screen could
influence subjects' attitudes, for example, about political candidates.
Subjects who viewed screens where the word "rats" was
flashed over political ads later rated the candidates negatively.
"They regarded them as
less trustworthy, more fishy, more disgusting," Weinberger
said, adding subjects who viewed screens that flashed positive
messages did not rate the candidates positively.
Loftus said although fewer
than half the subjects in her studies displayed false memories,
she argued the effect can be quite persuasive -- even if it is
to the subject's detriment. She cited instances in which police
interrogators will lie to suspects and cause them to confess
to crimes they did not commit.
The false-memory effect can
be widespread -- to the point of mass hysteria -- Loftus noted,
as in last fall's sniper incidents in Washington, D.C., in which
"there was the case of the white van that everyone was searching
for that did not exist."
Top World newsmaker Loftus: Scientists
probe tricks of the mind; Memories can be malleable, researchers
tell symposium
Lee Bowman, Scripps Howard
News Service
Denver
- Whether it's recalling
kissing a frog, witnessing a demonic possession or seeing a white
van leave a crime scene, humans can be a suggestive bunch.
Researchers described a new
generation of research on false memories and the effects of subliminal
suggestion during a scientific symposium here Sunday.
The scientists told the American
Association for the Advancement of Science that suggestive remarks,
subliminal messages and a phenomenon known as sleep paralysis
can trick our brains into forming false memories and hallucinations.
"Memory is highly susceptible
to distortion and contamination," said University of California-Irvine
cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, a pioneer in false memory
research. The sniper attacks around Washington, D.C., last fall,
when scores of witnesses became convinced they had seen a white
van or panel truck near a shooting scene is just one of the latest
notable examples of how eyewitness accounts can prove inaccurate,
she said.
Her three decades of research
have shown that people can be led to remember rather familiar
or common experiences, even when those experiences likely had
not occurred, she said.
Much of Loftus's work has focused
on false claims of repressed memories of sexual abuse.
She described one recent study
in which volunteers carried out a set of actions that mixed common
tasks, like flipping a coin, with more unusual behaviour, like
crushing a Hershey's kiss with a dental floss container. Later,
the researchers told the volunteers to imagine additional things
they'd done that day, like kissing a frog. Some days later, the
participants were asked to recall their actions on that specific
day and 15 per cent insisted they had actually performed some
of the actions they'd only imagined doing.
Joel Weinberger, a psychologist
at the Derner Institute at Adelphi University, said the science
of subliminal stimulation, discredited for allegedly sloppy research
four decades ago, has been revisited by a number of researchers
in recent years who have found "there is something important
going on in subliminal presentations.
"It can affect psychological
functioning by biasing perceptions and influencing decisions
without the person being aware of it," Weinberger said.
But it's not a matter of tapping
the subconscious or influencing buying decisions so much as it
is a memory phenomenon.
"Implicit memory and subliminal
perception studies are showing that much of human functioning
goes on unconsciously," Weinberger said.
He reported on two recent studies,
one in which the word "RATS" was flashed before participants
being asked to offer their impressions of a hypothetical candidate
running for office, with those who saw it forming more negative
impressions.
Richard McNally, a psychologist
at Harvard Medical School, recruited 10 adults who reported they'd
been abducted by space aliens and eight people who denied having
been abducted to see what emotional and physical reactions they
would have when they listened to their own voices on tapes describing
the sexual and medical probes to which they said they'd been
subjected on spaceships.
McNally said all the "abductees"
had had at least one episode of "sleep paralysis" accompanied
by frightening hallucinations upon awakening that were likely
the source of the abduction scenarios, although the "abductees"
were considered psychiatrically healthy.
The researchers measured heart
rate and sweating of the palm while each subject listened to
the tapes. All the of self-declared abductees had heightened
heart rate and sweating while listening, while the control subjects
didn't.
McNally said the study shows
that "falsely believing that you've been traumatized can
produce intense physiological reactions similar to those associated
with genuine traumatic memories. So contrary to what some researchers
have suggested, the intensity of an emotional reaction associated
with a memory doesn't confirm the authenticity of that memory."
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
