Lost in the Mall (False Memory) video transcript

In a challenge to the idea of repressed memory, Elizabeth Loftus set out to demonstrate experimentally how false memories could be implanted in some people. This came to be known as the Lost in the mall technique from the first study that involved trying to plant false childhood memories in 24 participants.

We contacted their mother or their father or an older relative of theirs, and then we went back to the subject and we said, we've been talking with your mother. We found out some things that happened to you when you were about five or six years old. We'd like to see what you can remember about these experiences that your mother told us about.

Participants were given three true experiences and a false one that involves being lost in a shopping mall as a six year old. Your mother told us that you were a shopping at the corner shopping mall on Saturday one time and you were by the pet store and all of a sudden you disappeared and you were gone for the longest period of time. And eventually we found you. You were crying. An elderly woman had rescued you and brought you back to the main office. Do you remember that experience? The researchers were able to plant false memories in 25% of their participants, a statistically significant figure. What surprised them was the rich detail of these false memories.

And they would start telling us things. Details about the appearance of the person who rescued them, other kinds of details that we had never mentioned to them. So that showed that they were putting a lot of sensory detail onto this created memory.

From this investigation, Loftus set out what she thought was the recipe for planting false memories. First you need the clients trust and therapist’s usually have that. Then you suggest something that might have happened and bring in persuasive supporting evidence.

So she would go into therapy with an eating disorder or depression and she’d end up with a therapist who says that everyone I've seen with those problems was sexually abused as a child. I wonder if anything like that happened to you?

So third you ask clients if they could remember this happening to them and sometimes they begin to add their own details. They take ownership of the memory.

This was going on really, all across North America and then other parts of the world, families were being destroyed in the process because once people develop these memories, they then accused their family members or other relatives or other former neighbours or former teachers, former anybody.

The lost in the mall study, ‘The Formation of False Memories’, was published in 1995, and critics were quick to point out some limitations. First, it was a small sample with only 24 participants. Second, being lost in the mall as a child is quite a common experience. Maybe it really had happened to some of the participants. And third, it was hardly a traumatic experience not comparable to those being uncovered by repressed memory therapists.

Lost in the Mall (False Memory) video

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