Crimes of Memory: False Memories and Societal Justice

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The author, Elizabeth Loftus, studied using her own scientific research and other researcher’s findings memory distortion as well as the effects that leading questions and external factors have on a person’s memory. She studied this because while conducting her own research on memory distortion she became aware that many people have become wrongly convicted of crimes. She decided to further investigate why these wrongful convictions were taking place. Loftus found that it is relatively easy to plant false memories using suggestive or leading questions during witness interviews. To further back up this claim she found it was easy to place false memories and convince people it is true even if the memory is seemingly impossible; such as meeting Bugs Bunny in Walt Disney World. The author has chosen the research this because she was shocked about how many people are wrongly convicted of crimes. This research has lead into innovations in police and detective work about how to properly question a witness or present a line up to a witness. This work will hopefully lead to less people being wrongly convicted such as what happened to Ronald Cotton who was wrongfully imprisoned for about 10 years for allegedly raping Jennifer Thompson. I found this essay consisted of information that was very similar to the information found in Module 26 of the Myer textbook (pages 340-346). Both provided similar if not the same information on misinformation and imagination effects, true and false memories, eye witness accounts and constructed memories of abuse. The essay did make me reflect on the effect of flashbulb memories that occurs in patients after undergoing an extremely emotional event such as rape that was presented in Module 24 of the Myer textbook (page 326). The textbook suggests that people that undergo significantly stressful and traumatic events can form very vivid memories

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