Mrs Loftus Quotes & Sayings

Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one. — Elizabeth Loftus

Zealous conviction is a dangerous substitute for an open mind. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, .. False memories have these characteristics too. — Elizabeth Loftus

In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened. — Elizabeth Loftus

When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. — Elizabeth Loftus

Most of the time, perhaps 99 percent of the time, the defendant is guilty; his screams are the final protest of a human being about to lost his most precious possession, his freedom. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

We all have memories that are malleable and susceptible to being contaminated or supplemented in some way. — Elizabeth Loftus

My work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don't have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory. — Elizabeth Loftus

Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. — Elizabeth Loftus

To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything. — Elizabeth Loftus

We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories, — Elizabeth Loftus

Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:
What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate. — John W. Loftus

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. — Richard Dawkins

It is therefore perfectly plausible that memories of childhood sexual abuse could be buried for years and then recalled, and that motivated forgetting, dissociative amnesia, or some other mechanism could account for some of the allegations in cases that Loftus has testified in. But because of the way in which the entire debate has been framed around the issue of "repression" and "recovery," these nuances have been largely ignored. — Moheb Costandi

A laboratory analogy to repression can be found in an experiment by A.F. Zeller.
Zeller arranged a situation so that one group of students underwent an unhappy "failure" experience right after they had successfully learned a list of nonsense syllables. When tested later, these subjects showed much poorer recall of the nonsense syllables compared to a control group, who had not experienced failure. When this same "failure" group was later allowed to succeed on the same task that they had earlier failed, their recall showed tremendous improvement. This experiment indicates that when the reason for the repression is removed, when material to be remembered is no longer associated with negative effects, a person no longer experiences retrieval failure. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in "crude psychiatric analysis," guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and "incestuous opinion citing," these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making "therapeutic lifers" out of their patients and ripping families apart. This — Elizabeth F. Loftus