Psychologist may or may not remember her biggest day

Jeff Benson

Elizabeth Loftus calls it the highest national award she could

receive as a psychologist, but the distinguished UC Irvine research

professor might not always clearly remember being notified that she

won it.

If her theories come to fruition, Loftus will have to factor in

the occasional mind distortion, contaminated memory and unreliability

of eyewitness testimony. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll determine she

got caught up in the moment.

Loftus received the 2005 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award

for Psychology last week for her research on false recollections and

the malleability of memory.

The Grawemeyer Awards annually honor the most powerful ideas in

psychology, education, religion, music composition and improving

world order. Each winner is given a $200,000 prize.

“I was pretty shocked,” Loftus said. “There just isn’t any other

prize like this for a psychologist. There’s no Nobel Prize for

psychology, so really there’s no other way for a psychologist to win

in this way.”

In 2002, the Review of General Psychology ranked Loftus the 58th

most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. She was the top-ranked

woman on the list.

She’s also been an expert witness or consultant in nearly 200

high-profile legal cases involving the validity of eyewitness

testimony or possible false recollections, said Ron Huff, dean of the

UC Irvine School of Social Ecology. Trials involving Michael Jackson,

Rodney King and the Oklahoma City bombing were among those cases.

“In my research on wrongful convictions over the last 20 years, I

relied on her a lot,” Huff said. “There are so many cases on wrongful

convictions -- and by that I mean people who are later determined

innocent beyond doubt. Many of these cases turn on eyewitness error.

“Loftus is one of the real pioneers in this field. She’s respected

around world for her work, which this prize recognizes.”

Loftus’s research has shown that people not only forget over time

but also falsely remember, recalling events that never happened when

their minds blend inaccurate information with their memory of what

actually happened.

Individuals sometimes have difficulty separating the two, such as

in eyewitness testimony, she said.

“I have been an advocate of the notion that people sometimes have

erroneous beliefs or misconceptions over how testimony works,” she

said. “When people bring erroneous beliefs into the courtroom,

sometimes they make mistakes. We know one of the main reasons people

are falsely convicted is due to inaccurate testimony.”

In the 1990s, much of Loftus’s research was spent making people

believe they’ve had entirely false experiences, she said. Some of her

subjects have left her sessions inaccurately believing they’ve

witnessed demonic possession and that they were harassed by a bully

in their youth, she said.

“I could make you believe the man who ran from the scene had curly

hair instead of straight hair, or that you were lost in a mall at the

age of 6, and people had to come find you,” she said. “Other people

have taken this paradigm and really run with it.”

Most of her prize money will be used to further her research at

UCI, she said. She is researching people’s bad experiences with food,

such as getting sick from eating dill pickles, and looking into how

the experiences can affect subsequent thoughts and memories.

The research she’s conducted has been primarily in restaurants,

but she’d like to broaden her scope, she said.

“I want to take [a research group] out for a real picnic and

barbecue and put real foods in front of them for a more realistic

study,” she said. “I’m trying to demonstrate that false beliefs and

false memories do have repercussions for everybody.

“But I’m still digesting the news that I won.”