Oh, Joy, False Memories Are in the News

[writerkit]

 

I cannot, in a quick Google search, find any evidence these people are directly connected to the False Memory Syndrome people. And the malleability of memory is a thing that needs to be studied, just by people who are open to all possibilities and not starting with a predetermined conclusion.

But it hasn't been nearly long enough since the Memory Wars for someone who's published over 100 articles on the subject to not have been active during the Memory Wars, and at that point if you want to be doing responsible reporting you need to specify what they were doing during that time, or it's too hard to determine if the people you're writing about are credible or not. There's not enough evidence of false memories as a widespread thing for this to be an especially exciting find, especially since they don't appear to have tried this technique on real memories, in which case they haven't proven whether this is actually reversing the false memory or just a second manipulation of memory in the reverse direction. (Have you noticed that all the "memory is malleable" people are focused on creating false memories and no one ever asks whether you can be made to be convinced real memories are false? I'm not sure how you'd design this experiment such that it gets past the IRB, since you're basically asking permission to gaslight people in the name of science, but someone needs to be devoting effort to the question if they want to study this at all seriously.)

The question is whether someone-- either the reporter or the scientists-- is trying to reignite the Memory Wars.

Comments

[siderea]

The question is whether someone-- either the reporter or the scientists-- is trying to reignite the Memory Wars.

So I just thought of this post, because I was just reading an article in the Atlantic which somewhat randomly cited Elizabeth Loftus. It's an article about memory and the Pandemic, and just happens to cite her for, basically, no reason. Nothing about her more controversial work. Just about the malleability of memory:

The work of Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at UC Irvine, and others has shown that, if we discuss a memory with listeners who remember it differently, we may unconsciously borrow a bit of their local color or scrap of dialogue for our own version. “Every time you bring a memory to mind, it’s activated, then reconsolidated,” Fivush told me. And we’re open to accepting other people’s interpretation of our own memories. “We need to make sense of things,” she continued. “During COVID, you call your friend to say, ‘I’m so lonely,’ and she says, ‘I know, but Zooming with your family helps, doesn’t it? I feel like I’m talking to my grown kids more than ever,’ and you immediately start to think about your situation differently. You’ll remember it differently.”

I thought that was a very odd choice. They basically name check her, but don't quote her or discuss her work further in the (very long) article.

Made me think of your question. Is someone trying to rehabilitate her reputation or Google juice? Finding places to stick in benign references to her?

[writerkit]

I did a search for results of her in the past year. She's being honored in November with the American Philosophical Society's Suppes prize and also very publicly donated $20,000 to the university she works at, with a very laudatory article that mentions none of her controversies (and also includes a list of honors she's received some of which are depressingly recent). There's a profile from two weeks ago in The New Yorker, also very laudatory with no mention of the controversy. One from October on Cognifit.

On a regular search without the time constraints, it took me until the end of page two to get something that mentions her controversy.

[siderea]

Fuck. I wonder if she's hired a PR firm.