Elizabeth Loftus

**Biography**

Elizabeth Loftus was born on October 16, 1944 and grew up in Bel Air, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, California . Growing up, she often reported upon how happy she felt and how wonderful her life was. For example, in her journal that she kept for six years, she mentioned superlatives she received in school, including “most comical” and “irresistible”. During her childhood, her mother was sent to a psychiatric hospital for about half a year. Within five days of her return, her mother was found dead in a swimming pool. While it was declared to be an accident by the coroner, it was questioned whether her mother had committed suicide. Despite Loftus’ expression of jubilance through her diary, after her mother passed away, she included paperclipped “removable truths,” pieces of paper of memories about why she resented her mother, into her diary. In addition, Loftus reports being abused by a babysitter at the age of six.

For her undergraduate degree, Loftus initially planned on becoming a math teacher but gained interest in psychology. As a result, she majored in both psychology and mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In her adult life, she and her current ex-husband, Geoff Loftus, had difficulty becoming pregnant. To increase her chances of becoming pregnant, her gynecologist recommended that she have a fibroid removed from her uterus. However, because she did not want to miss a day of work, she turned the surgical procedure into an experiment. She asked the doctor during the surgery to read her 100 words to test whether she could still remember them after hearing them in an unconscious state.

Loftus received her Master of Arts degree in 1967 and PhD in 1970, both from Stanford University. In 1973, she obtained a position at the University of Washington, where she remained for 29 years as part of the psychology and law faculty. Currently, she is a professor at the University of California, Irvine in both the Psychology & Social Behavior and Criminology, Law, & Society departments. Loftus has authored at least 20 books and over 400 research articles. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists and has been named a James McKeen Cattell Fellow and a William James Fellow. She served as the American Psychological Association’s president from 1998-1999 and was named the most influential female psychologist of the 20th century by the *Review of General Psychology*.

**Research**

Loftus’ primary research focuses on the inaccuracy of memory. This includes understanding that how people say things can be suggestive in changing someone’s memory and that introduction of information that may not be accurate can contaminate memories. Her other areas of study include eyewitness testimony and courtroom procedure. Her research began in 1973 upon accepting her professorship at University of Washington when she gained access to video recordings of car crashes from local police stations. She found that when she asked research participants how fast the car was going when it “hit” or “smashed” into something, people recalled the car going faster when the suggestive word “smashed” was used. This began her landmark research which itself led to dozens of published research studies. Arguably her most acknowledged study, “Lost in the Shopping Mall,” demonstrated that adults had the ability to believe they had been lost in a mall as a child, even though that had never occurred. Loftus likens this phenomenon to a “flimsy curtain that separates our imagination and our memory." Loftus’ rise to fame coincided with the era that computers started being seen as a metaphor for the mind, in which outside influences (i.e. social and cultural) had the capacity to impact the ‘output.’ This led to a major shift in understanding memory from being “fixed and immutable” to having qualities akin to what Loftus described as a “living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-­like creature.”

Around the time of time of her car crash study, Loftus began receiving requests from defense lawyers to testify on behalf of their clients in court. Specifically, they sought her expertise in defending the malleability of memory depending on how the questions are posed when the accused are asked to identify possible perpetrators. In reference to the latter point, it was found that misidentification of perpetrators most frequently occurs when a white witness wrongly attributes a black defendant. However, despite Loftus being viewed as a leading academic figure in psychology on this subject, many of the cases she has taken on have been controversial and unpopular. Because Loftus believes that accusers of crimes often have many more supporters than the defendant, she has testified in court on behalf of numerous infamous convicted criminals and alleged perpetrators, including OJ Simpson, Bill Cosby, Scooter Libby, Jerry Sandusky, Ted Bundy, and more recently, Harvey Weinstein. However, Loftus reports that the one case she refused to accept was for somebody accused of operating gas chambers in Treblinka during the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, Loftus’ willingness to defend sexual perpetrators in court has led to major backlash, particularly as the "MeToo" movement popularized. This was especially the case with Harvey Weinstein, whose case she attempted to avoid taking on for many months. However, when she eventually agreed to be an expert witness, law students at UC Irvine demanded that Loftus was fired from the faculty. However, she continues to teach there now. Based on her beliefs on the fickle nature of memory, she believes that people, even clinicians, who utilize hypnosis and other suggestive techniques can lead people to believe that they were victims even if that were not actually the case. In this way, she was viewed as setting back the women’s movement due to her lack of belief in a woman’s word that they were perpetrated against. In 1989, she had been invited to speak at the University of Michigan but the Chair of the department prohibited it for this very reason. Loftus faced disagreement even within the field, with therapists providing rationale that it is a survival technique to repress traumatic memories and not to remember all the details from a traumatic event. However, Loftus’ research has led her to be skeptical in relying upon victims’ recovered memories depending on how they were elicited. Nevertheless, her research has often been upheld over time, highlighted by the McMartin preschool case where childcare workers were accused of sexual abuse. It was ultimately discovered after years of trials that the manner in which the children were questioned about these accusations led to false memories.

**Further Reading**

1.     Newberry, L. (2020, February 7). Harvey Weinstein trial: Memory expert and UC Irvine professor Elizabeth Loftus testifies for defense. *Los Angeles Times*. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-07/memory-expert-elizabeth-loftus-testifies-for-the-defense-in-harvey-weinstein-trial

2.    Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. *Psychiatric Annals, 25*(12), 720–725. https://doi.org/10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07

3.    Reinhold, R. (1990, January 24). The Longest trial-a post-mortem; Collapse of child-abuse case: So much agony for so little. *The New York Times*. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/24/us/longest-trial-post-mortem-collapse-child-abuse-case-so-much-agony-for-so-little.html

4.    HISTORY. (2021, January 28). *The McMartin preschool trials*. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-mcmartin-preschool-trials

5. Loftus, E. F., & Hoffman, H. G. (1989). Misinformation and memory: The creation of new memories. *Journal of experimental psychology: General*, *118*(1), 100.

6. Loftus, E. F., & Loftus, G. R. (1980). On the permanence of stored information in the human brain. *American Psychologist, 35*(5), 409–420. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.5.409

7. Mcleod, S. (1970, January 1). *Loftus and Palmer*. Loftus and Palmer | Simply Psychology. Retrieved December 9, 2021, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html.

8. Costandi, M. Evidence-based justice: Corrupted memory. *Nature* 500, 268–270 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/500268a

1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29 1.30 1.31 Aviv, R. (2021, April 5). How Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. *The New Yorker*. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-loftus-changed-the-meaning-of-memory
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2021, November). *Professor Elizabeth F. Loftus*. https://www.amacad.org/person/elizabeth-f-loftus
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 The American Academy of Political & Social Science (n.d.). *Elizabeth Loftus*. https://www.aapss.org/fellow/elizabeth-loftus/
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Luna, K. (2019, October 9). How memory can be manipulated [Audio podcast episode]. In *Speaking of psychology*. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/memory-manipulated
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Newberry, L. (2020, February 6). This ‘false memory’ expert has testified in hundreds of trials. Now she’s been hired by Harvey Weinstein. *Los Angeles Times*. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-06/false-memory-expert-testify-harvey-weinstein-trial
6. ↑ Hopwood, A. R. (2019, June 27). *Lost in the mall and other false memories*. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XQze2hIAAGYP8ckl