Rationally Speaking #150 - Elizabeth Loftus on "The malleability of human memory"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2016

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you remember when you were a kid, and you had that great day at Disneyland where you got to meet Bugs Bunny? No? Think harder. It was a sunny day... In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia interviews psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, whose pioneering work on human memory revealed that our memories can be contaminated by the questions people ask us, or by misinformation we encounter after the fact -- even to the point of making us remember entire events that never could have happened. (Like meeting Bugs Bunny, a Warner Bros character, at Disneyland.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.5	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.
0:31.0	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.0	I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and with me is today's guest, Professor Elizabeth Loftus.
0:46.2	Elizabeth is a cognitive scientist specializing in the fallibility and malleability of human memory,
0:53.7	especially with respect to recovered memories.
0:57.7	And her work has landed her on the list of the top 100 psychologists of the 20th century.
1:04.0	She was the highest ranking woman on that list. It's also won her numerous awards and changed
1:09.0	the way the legal system handles eyewitness and recovered
1:12.5	memory testimony. She's been an expert witness or consultant in hundreds of cases. Elizabeth,
1:17.9	welcome to the show. Thank you. My pleasure. So to start off, maybe you could give us the historical
1:23.4	context for your work. What was the state of knowledge of how memory worked before your
1:31.7	body of work hit the scene? And what was the major change in the way psychologists thought about
1:36.7	memory? Well, I would have to take you back to, I guess, the 1970s when I first, I was out of graduate school and I was trying to think
1:52.3	about what kind of research that I wanted to do next because I really wanted to do some research
1:58.9	that had more immediate, practical relevance than the kind of work
2:03.6	that I had been doing in graduate school and in the first few years postgraduate school.
2:10.6	And I had done a little bit of studying of memory, but very theoretical work in memory, the kind of work that you could talk to maybe five other people about who would care.
2:22.3	Right.
2:23.3	Anyhow, I had always been interested in legal matters, and I decided that maybe I could combine my expertise as an experimental psychologist and having some
2:37.1	expertise in memory with my interest in legal issues. And I started studying the memory of witnesses
2:44.4	to, first to accidents because I got funding from the Department of Transportation and later to memory
	...

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