The Elizabeth Loftus: A Complex Incident

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People see the world not as it is, but as they are. When I was a child, there was an old man who lived two doors down; my brother, Jack, and I only ever saw him when he had to put his bins out on a Monday night. Naturally we both made up plots, where he was always the villain, murdering young girls or keeping captives in his basement. One Sunday afternoon we had nothing to do and so we decided to investigate this matter further. We snuck out of our gate and walked down the street until we were outside his house. As there was no car in the garage we slunk around the side of the house, looking for evidence we could present to the police. As we entered the path around the side I saw a small window just above ground level looking into the basement. Jack and I peered through the window and were transfixed by the assortment of gruesome weapons he…show more content…
Our memory in effect shapes our reality and this is the basis of Elizabeth Loftus’ research. In her experiment she selected a random assortment of people and subjected them to footage of a car crash. She then asked a variety of questions relating to the speed of the vehicles before the incident. From this, Loftus concluded that the speed the participant thought the vehicle was going changed depending on the way the question was phrased. For example, when she asked, “how fast was the car going when the two cars smashed?” the participants gave a much higher speed than when the question was phrased, “how fast was the car going when the two cars collided?” This research created a lot of skepticism over the accuracy of eyewitness accounts and since then DNA testing has found a lot of convicted felons to be innocent. A remarkable 75% of these were due to false eyewitness testimonies. This means we are constantly, unconsciously reshaping our memories with experiences and knowledge we find after the

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