Professor Elizabeth Loftus – Memory and Conspiracy

Tales From The Rabbit Hole
Episode 31
December 17, 2019

"Elizabeth Loftus is an expert on memory. A Distinguished Professor in several fields*, her work focusses on false memories, how they can be accidentally created and how they can be deliberately manipulated. We discuss many aspects of memory and how it sometimes relates to the world of conspiracy theories.  We touch on UFOs, Chemtrails, 9/11, Jeffery Epstein, and the moral panics of the 1980s."

https://www.tftrh.com/2019/12/17/episode-31-professor-elizabeth-loftus-memory-and-conspiracy/

What Experts Wish You Knew about False Memories

Julia Shaw
Scientific America
August 8, 2016

Every memory you have ever had is chock-full of errors. I would even go as far as saying that memory is largely an illusion.

This is because our perception of the world is deeply imperfect, our brains only bother to remember a tiny piece of what we actually experience, and every time we remember something we have the potential to change the memory we are accessing.

I often write about the ways in which our memory leads us astray, with a particular focus on ‘false memories.’ False memories are recollections that feel real but are not based on actual experience.

For this particular article I invited a few top memory researchers to comment on what they wish everyone knew about their field.

First up, we have Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California, Irvine, who is one of the founders of the area of false memory research, and is considered one of the most ‘eminent psychologists of the 20th century.’
Elizabeth Loftus says you need independent evidence to corroborate your memories.

According to Loftus: “The one take home message that I have tried to convey in my writings, and classes, and in my TED talk is this: Just because someone tells you something with a lot of confidence and detail and emotion, it doesn't mean it actually happened. You need independent corroboration to know whether you're dealing with an authentic memory, or something that is a product of some other process.”

Next up, we have memory scientist Annelies Vredeveldt from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who has done fascinating work on how well we remember when we recall things with other people.

Annelies Vredeveldt says to be careful how you ask questions about a memory.
According to Vredeveldt: “What I'd like everyone to know is how (not) to probe for a memory of an event.

When you are trying to get a story out of someone, be it about a witnessed crime or a wild night out, it seems natural to ask them lots of questions about it. However, asking closed questions, such as ‘what was the color of his hair?’ or worse, leading questions, such as ‘he was a redhead, wasn't he?’ often leads to incorrect answers.

It is much better to let the person tell the story of their own accord, without interrupting and without asking questions afterwards. At most, you might want to ask the person if they can tell you a bit more about something they mentioned, but limit yourself to an open and general prompt such as ‘can you tell me more about that?’

Research shows that stories told in response to free-recall prompts are much more accurate than stories told in response to a series of closed questions. So if you really want to get to the bottom of something, restrain yourself and don't ask too many questions!”

Finally, we have Chris French from Goldsmiths, University of London, who has done decades of research on anomalous and paranormal memories, and believes that some of these may be the result of false memories.
Chris French wants you to stop believing common memory myths.

“My top 5 take-home messages on memory:

1. Memory does not work like a video camera, accurately recording all of the details of witnessed events. Instead, memory (like perception) is a constructive process. We typically remember the gist of an event rather than the exact details.
2. When we  construct a memory, errors can occur. We will typically fill in gaps in our memories with what we think we must have experienced not necessarily what we actually did experience. We may also include misinformation we encountered after the event. We will not even be consciously aware that this has happened.
3. We not only distort memories for events that we have witnessed, we may have completely false memories for events that never occurred at all. Such false memories are particularly likely to arise in certain contexts, such as (unintentionally) through the use of certain dubious psychotherapeutic techniques or (intentionally) in psychology experiments.
4. There is no convincing evidence to support the existence of the psychoanalytic concept of repression, despite it being a widely accepted concept.
5. There is currently no way to distinguish, in the absence of independent evidence, whether a particular memory is true or false. Even memories which are detailed and vivid and held with 100 percent conviction can be completely false.”

The take home message remains: Your memory is incredibly malleable. Because you often cannot spot a false memory once it has taken hold, the only way to prevent false memories is to know that they exist and to avoid things that facilitate them.

Want to learn more about the science of false memory? Learn about the work of Loftus, Vredeveldt, French, and hundreds of other fascinating memory scientists in my new book The Memory Illusion.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-experts-wish-you-knew-about-false-memories/?WT.mc_id=SA_FB_MB_BLOG

SATANISTS INFILTRATE A RITUAL ABUSE CONFERENCE IN OAKLAND: YOUR GUIDE TO WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY

Religion Dispatches
BY JOSEPH LAYCOCK

JUNE 16, 2016

In May, a group of Satanists infiltrated a conference for people who believe they’re the victims of a Satanic conspiracy.

RD contributor Joseph Laycock has answers to all of your burning questions.

Wait, enough people believe that they’re victims of a Satanic conspiracy to fill an entire conference?

Yes. In May, the Ritual Abuse and Child Abuse 2016 Conference was held in Oakland. The theme was overcoming mind control and subliminal programming.

Who goes to an event like this?

Some people believe they have suffered abuse they cannot remember, have alternate personalities of which they are unaware, or have even committed crimes they cannot recall, all because of sadistic rituals inflicted on them as a form of mind control. Who do they think is responsible for this psychological abuse? The usual suspects include unnamed “cults,” the CIA, and an alleged conspiracy of organized criminal Satanists.

These techniques of mind control are believed to be so insidious that conference attendees were apparently forbidden from touching their faces, for fear that any subtle hand gesture could be a cue that triggers a victim’s subliminal programming.

And then actual Satanists showed up?

They did. Amidst all this paranoia, Satanists actually had infiltrated the conference, and they recently went public with the reason why. In a twist worthy of a bad M. Night Shyamalan film, the Satanists claim that they are the ones exposing a dangerous cabal and that it is the conference organizers who are abusing their patients.

Who are these Satanists?

The Grey Faction of The Satanic Temple (TST). TST are atheists, and they do not believe in the supernatural. But they insist that they are an actual religion because they are a community with a shared body of symbols, rituals, and ethics. The group’s first tenet is to “act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.”

The Grey Faction is a division of TST that seeks to raise awareness about medical professionals who continue to promote conspiracy theories about Satanism. The Grey Faction protested a similar conference in April.

So they don’t draw pentagrams and slaughter chickens?

Like the French Situationists of the 1960s, TST believes that shock value can be a useful tool for reframing the political conversation. In April, for example, the Detroit chapter countered a Christian protest of an abortion clinic by dressing as sado-masochistic babies and accusing the protestors of “fetal idolatry.” While many find their antics offensive, their group has never performed sacrifices or physically harmed anyone.

Do Satanists really brainwash people?

No. Nobody brainwashes people, actually, because brainwashing isn’t real.

It’s not?

Psychological manipulation is real, and takes many forms, but “brainwashing” is a made up concept that originated in American propaganda during the Korean War. In 1950, Edward Hunter, a journalist with ties to the CIA, ran a story with the headline, “Brain-Washing Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party” in the Miami News. That article introduced “brainwashing” to the American vocabulary.

During the Cold War “brainwashing” became a way to acknowledge the loyalty of communist soldiers while simultaneously discrediting it as a kind of false consciousness. It also helped to explain American POWs who appeared to cooperate with their communist captors.

How did the concept jump from Communist soldiers to Americans?

Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film adaption introduced the idea that ordinary people could be brainwashed assassins and not even know it. Even the CIA believed in the possibility of mind control during this era, leading to the nefarious MKULTRA experiments. In turn, revelations about this program provided even more fodder for conspiracy theorists.

In the 1970s, brainwashing became less associated with evil governments and more associated with evil religions. During the “cult wars” of the 1970s an anti-cult movement alleged that minority religions use brainwashing to gain converts. An industry of “deprogrammers” emerged, promising to “rescue” people from religions they only thought they had chosen to join.

In the 1980s, this cultural fear of cults mutated into a fear of Satanic conspiracies. Brainwashing melded with the language of therapy and recovery, resulting in a panic over “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (SRA). SRA was inspired by the 1980 bestseller Michelle Remembers, an account of “repressed memories” that Michelle Smith recovered through hours of hypnosis therapy with her psychiatrist (and eventual husband) Lawrence Padzer. Smith “remembered” that her mother had been a Satanist who had tortured her for months in bizarre Satanic rituals intended to convert her to Satanism.

Michelle Remembers was immediately discredited, but fear of SRA continued. By the late 1980s a small group of therapists claimed that highly organized Satanic cults were conspiring to abuse countless children each year. The purpose of these rituals, they claimed, was to traumatize the victim so badly that victims would be unable to remember the abuse ever occurred. Furthermore, they claimed that this abuse fragments the victim’s mind, creating multiple personalities or “alters.” Like Major Ben Marco in The Manchurian Candidate, these repressed personalities can be activated at any time to do the bidding of the cult. An unaware SRA victim could supposedly have their body taken over to torture and program their own children. Talks show hosts Geraldo and Oprah interviewed alleged survivors of SRA and did much to disseminate this mythology to the public.

Oprah was wrong?!

It was a manufactured panic. In the 1990s SRA was debunked by some prominent experts: FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, retired police officer Robert Hicks, and journalist Debbie Nathan, to name a few. Cognitive scientists such as Elizabeth Loftus have largely discredited the idea of repressed memories.

In 1995 even Geraldo recanted his support for SRA, announcing, “I am convinced that I was terribly wrong . . . and many innocent people were convicted and went to prison as a result . . . And I am equally positive [that the] repressed memory therapy movement is also a bunch of crap.” Despite all this, these ideas are still advanced on the fringes of the mental health community.

Are these conspiracy theories dangerous?

Yes. In many cases, patients being treated for SRA have survived actual abuse, or suffer from other mental health issues. These conspiracy theories divert attention from actual abusers and cognitive disorders. At worst, the paranoid worldview promoted by these theories can escalate into dangerous situations.

Take, for example, Mary S. and Pat Burgess, two women who initially sought treatment for depression from psychiatrist Bennett Braun and therapist Roberta G. Sachs. Shortly before treating the pair, Braun and Sachs had attended a workshop on SRA by Dr. Corydon Hammond, a self-described expert in brainwashing and cult phenomena. (Dr. Hammond has also spoken about Nazi scientists, cabala, “psychic assassins,” and other conspiracy threads). Braun and Sachs convinced their patients that they had multiple-personality disorder (MPD) caused by SRA.

Mary was told that she was “cult royalty” and that her family had practiced cult abuse for generations. She allegedly possessed dozens of “alters” who had engaged in murder, cannibalism, and other activities without her knowledge. Mary was institutionalized for two years on the grounds that her violent programming could be triggered at any moment, endangering her family. Her husband divorced her, her son became frightened of her, and her symptoms did not end until her therapy finally ceased.

Most recently, the Grey Faction has brought attention to the case of Gigi Jordan, who killed her autistic child believing this was the only way to stop Satanists from abusing him. Jordan had been treated by Ellen Lacter, a psychologist who has advanced conspiracy theories about witches and Satanists. The Grey Faction has filed a complaint about Dr. Lacter’s advocacy for conspiracy theories with the California Board of Psychology.

All right, SRA conspiracies are dangerous. But is the Grey Faction justified in infiltrating conferences and targeting specific individuals?

TST spokesperson Doug Mesner frames this work as investigative journalism, while organizers of these conferences see it as a violation of the safe environment they are trying to create for the victims of abuse. Critics have called The Grey Faction “witch hunters.”

The fight over the reality of SRA and repressed memories is old, but the Grey Faction’s tactics are definitely new. Many academics and medical professionals agree that anti-Satanist conspiracy theorists are dangerous, but few would go so far as to single out individuals or file complaints with medical boards. Instead of debunking conspiracy theories, the Grey Faction is directly challenging the legitimacy of the people promoting these ideas.

In many ways, the fight between the Grey Faction and the remaining SRA advocates is a continuation of the “cult wars” that began in the 1970s when prejudice against minority religions were framed in medical terms. Fights over the reality of brainwashing and evil conspiracies never died, they just moved to the periphery. Time will tell whether the Grey Faction’s aggressive tactics will discredit SRA once and for all or drive this culture of conspiracy even deeper underground.

http://religiondispatches.org/satanist-infiltration-guide/

Can psychological treatments be harmful?

Luisa Dillner
The Guardian
April 3, 2016

The side effects of antidepressants are well known – nausea, dry mouth, constipation and loss of interest in sex. But what if your depression is being treated by a psychological therapy? Are there any risks in that? Research in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggests there might be – out of 14,587 people who responded to a survey asking about a range of psychological therapies, one in 20 said they had “lasting bad effects” from treatment.

In a separate, in-depth study, researchers found that some people complained of becoming more angry, anxious or losing self-esteem, though they did not follow up to see if these symptoms were resolved. People were more likely to feel harmed if they did not know which psychological therapy they were being given, or if they were not white and heterosexual. So should you worry about being harmed by a dose of psychological therapy?

The solution

Psychological therapies are generally safe. Scott O Lilienfeld, professor of psychology at Emory University in the US and author of a review on the harms of psychological therapies, says it is hard to know if people would have got worse anyway, without therapy. Symptoms such as anger, anxiety and depression can fluctuate over time.

But some psychological therapies do have evidence of harm. Critical incident stress debriefing, often offered after violent events (such as witnessing terrorism), can paradoxically increase the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Pop psychology says it is best to get everything out of your system, but that may not be everyone’s coping style,” says Lilienfeld. “In crisis debriefing, because it is done in group sessions, you can’t titrate the amount of exposure to the individual, so some may get more upset. The intervention is short, so there may be lack of resolution.”

Recovered memory techniques, meanwhile, have shown a five-fold increase in admissions to mental health institutions and a seven-fold rise in suicidal thoughts. In New Jersey, a programme called Scared Straight that exposed at-risk adolescents to the realities of prison life, actually led to an increase in offending.

Lilienfield thinks it is more important to identify harmful therapists than treatments. Therapists who are confrontational, lack empathy and don’t disclose which treatment they are using should be avoided. There is a list of evidence-based treatments, so you can check the one you are being given works for your condition. Most should work regardless of ethnic group or sexual orientation. Lilienfeld says that if you are no better after a month of therapy, then you should ask your therapist why this is.

Some therapies, for example for obsessive-compulsive disorders, should show improvement after a couple of sessions​ (even if it is from feeling terrible to horrible). Your therapist should always ask if your symptoms have got worse. And Lilienfield says you don’t have to feel worse in therapy before you get better.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/03/can-psychological-therapies-be-harmful

Social recall: factors that can affect false memory

The brain can be as creative as it is inaccurate when it comes to memory, working to turn made-up stories and childhood emotions into remembered fact

Chris French
The Guardian
March 29, 2016

The fallibility of human memory is one of the most well established findings in psychology. There have been thousands of demonstrations of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony under well-controlled conditions dating back to the very earliest years of the discipline. Relatively recently, it was discovered that some apparent memories are not just distorted memories of witnessed events: they are false memoriesfor events that simply never took place at all.

Psychologists have developed several reliable methods for implanting false memories in a sizeable proportion of experimental participants. It is only in the last few years, however, that scientists have begun to systematically investigate the phenomenon of non-believed memories. These are subjectively vivid memories of personal experiences that an individual once believed were accurate but now accepts are not based upon real events.

Prior to this, there were occasional anecdotal reports of non-believed memories. One of the most famous was provided by the influential developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. He had a clear memory of almost being kidnapped at about the age of two and of his brave nurse beating off the attacker. His grateful family were so impressed with the nurse that they gave her a watch as a reward. Years later, the nurse confessed that she had made the whole story up. Even after he no longer believed that the event had taken place, Piaget still retained his vivid and detailed memory of it.

The first systematic empirical investigation of non-believed memories was that reported by Giuliana Mazzoni, Alan Scoboria, and Lucy Harvey in 2010 . It found that one person in five reported such “memories” and that, in general, they had the same subjective characteristics as genuine memories, albeit that they tended to be more negative in emotional valence.Subsequent research has provided greater insight into non-believed memories. For example, it turns out that most of them are dated from mid-to-late childhood, suggesting that memories from this period are particularly susceptible to later revision.

Recently, artist AR Hopwood has compiled a fascinating collection of non-believed memories and published them as The False Memory Archive. He has used this collection to inspire a number of artworks supported by the Wellcome Trust. The examples in the archive, which range from relatively mundane to extremely bizarre, nicely illustrate some of the findings from the scientific studies, in particular the reasons people come to reject their once-believed “memories”.

Social recall

The most common reason people give for rejecting a memory is social feedback. This can take many forms but often it is simply a case of another person saying that the events in question either never happened or else happened very differently from the way they are remembered. Here are a couple of examples from the archive to illustrate this point:

“I was in a family member’s house in New York State during a summer holiday when I was a child. There was a tornado and I vividly remember seeing it approach from the window. We all hid in the basement. After asking my mother about it years on, she assured me this never happened.”

“I have always believed I was on a plane from Italy to Gatwick in 1968 at the age of 12 and the plane overshot the runway. I have very specific memories of getting off the plane via the emergency exit, shoes in hand. Other people who were on the same plane as me have told me it never happened, but I’ve gone as far as checking our newspaper reports from the date to see if it was real or not.”

Of course, it is always possible in some cases that the claimant does have an accurate memory and it is those around them who have either forgotten the event or else themselves have distorted memories. In many cases, however, there is independent evidence that proves conclusively that the memory must be false:

“I lived in London in 1961 with my sister. I was 21, she was 25. We returned to Australia after a year and occasionally reminisced about “the corner shop across the road”. Thirty years later my sister visited London. And found that the shop was actually a block away, on the equivalent corner. I was unconvinced, but visited myself 50 years after our first visit to find it was true. The shop was a block away, it was not “across the road”. It could not even be seen from the house we lived in.”

Fantasy v fact

Another common reason for rejecting an apparent memory is simply its implausibility.

“I have a very vivid memory, one of my favourites as a child, of being driven along in the back seat of my Dad’s car. I could see his head over the top of the seat, and we were going quite fast along winding country roads. He turned his head and told me I had to look after the car for a minute, as he had to pop out. He then proceeded to open the door, and his head disappeared as the door closed. I can clearly see him in my mind rolling along the grass verge and disappearing behind me as the car sped on. I sat, panicking, for what felt like minutes, until the door opened and he jumped back in – I can’t remember how he managed that part though.”

There are many examples in the archive of people reporting memories of either being able to fly or to breathe underwater:

“I can remember being able to fly as a small child. For years, in my teens I really struggled to accept that this wasn’t a real memory. I still have it with me today, memories of a number of separate occasions where I quite naturally flew rather than walked between two places.”

“I am convinced that I ‘remember’ being able to breathe underwater as a child, as long as I took tiny little breaths.”

A useful theoretical perspective for thinking about true memories, false memories and non-believed memories is referred to as theSource Monitoring Framework. Essentially, this refers to the psychological processes that allow us to identify the original source of mental representations. Sometimes we may remember things without correctly recalling where the information came from (eg thinking we directly witnessed an event when in fact we saw it in a film). One particular aspect of source monitoring, known as Reality Monitoring , focuses upon the processes involved in distinguishing between mental representations that were generated by external reality versus those that were generated internally (eg by dreams or imagination). One of the most reliable ways to generate false memories in psychology experiments is to simply get people to imagine events that never actually happened, a phenomenon known asimagination inflation.

This line of research not only provides insights into the nature of memory but also goes to the heart of our sense of identity itself. After all, that sense of identity is largely based upon our autobiographical memories of the events and experiences that have shaped us and made us into the people we are today. It is more than a little disconcerting to realise that some of our most prized experiences may never have actually happened at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/mar/29/social-recall-factors-that-can-affect-false-memory

Decades Later, Questions Remain In Thurston County Ritual Abuse Case

KPLU
GABRIEL SPITZER
October 15, 2015

In the late 1980s, Paul Ingram was a prominent member of the community in Olympia, serving as a senior sheriff’s deputy and chairman of the Thurston County Republican Party.

Then he was implicated in a shocking series of crimes: His own daughters accused him of sexually abusing them, repeatedly, over many years. But that was just the first twist in a tale full of bizarre turns.

Ingram, who claimed he had no memory of the abuse, nevertheless made a full confession. Soon the accusations grew more shocking and more gruesome. His daughters said their father had invited friends – fellow deputies – to participate in the abuse.

They claimed Paul Ingram and others were members of a Satanic cult that practiced ritual rape, murder and sacrifice. And as the alleged crimes got more grandiose and more horrific, Ingram’s confessions got more detailed as well.

 Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright investigated the case and found no forensic evidence to corroborate the stories. Wright determined that Ingram’s confessions were false, part of an episode of mass hysteria. He traces the case’s connections to the later-discredited panic around Satanic cult abuse and repressed memories.

He wrote about it in his 1994 book, “Remembering Satan.” He joined KPLU’s Gabriel Spitzer for Sound Effect’s episode on “Confessions” to explain why he argues that an innocent man was lulled into believing, ardently, in his own guilt.

http://www.kplu.org/post/decades-later-questions-remain-thurston-county-ritual-abuse-case

How Reliable is Your Memory?

June 2013 at TEDGlobal 2013

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics -- and raises some important ethical questions.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the TED home page.

https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory