Book Reading #29 - Opening Skinner's Box (Mar 1)

Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall

Summary:

In this chapter, the author talks about Elizabeth Loftus's research about human memory. Loftus says that there exists a very thin curtain between memory and imagination. And often times, we tend to confuse things between memory and imagination. She says that long term memory is very fragile and can be easily tampered and manipulated to some extent. Loftus believed that in many of the cases involving child abuse, people were wrongly convicted based on the memories of the children who grew up and claimed that they had memories of their parents abusing them when they were young. Loftus claims that such deviations are possible and the people convicted were not necessarily guilty. To prove this, she had to prove that it's not only possible to distort memories, but it's totally possible create fake memories. "lost in the mall" experiment told participants about their true childhood stories and then added a fake one about them being lost in a mall when they were young. Their parents cooperated in the experiment. The participants were given an option to deny remembering this event if they really couldn't recollect the memories. However, surprisingly large number of participants actually believed that they were lost in the mall and came up with stories of how they were lost. When they were told about the experiment, they were shocked and surprised.

Loftus claims that we hate white empty spaces in our memories. If we can remember something, we tend to make something up to fill in the memory gap and this may or may not be true, something deviating entirely from the truth. When someone trustworthy tells us something about our past, something that really did not happen, we tend to believe it and start believing it firmly as if the event indeed did occur. However, some psychologists argue that traumatic memories are very different than regular memories and that they are stored differently. Traumatic memories can never be forgotten or tampered with.

Discussion:

This was a very interesting chapter that made me doubt my memory ten times while I was reading different incidents mentioned in the chapter. I started doubting if my memories are genuine or is most of it my imagination. Most importantly, I think Loftus is talking about so much more than memory. She's talking about authenticity and whether we, as human beings, have it. If we can successfully fool our memories, then we probably don't have it.