Book Reading #29 - Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall

Reference:
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton & Company: 2008.


Summary:
Slater tells the story and work of Elizabeth Loftus, someone who says she is dedicated to helping those who could be wrongfully on trial or convicted because of long lost memory that seems to have just appeared on the surface of the mind years later after the actual even supposedly occurred.  She tells of George Franklin who was accused by his daughter (according to Loftus) at the suggestion of her new age psychologist of sexually abusing her.  She comes to the hypothesis that false memory can be implanted into peoples minds.

Loftus thought about how to design an experiment which would test this hypothesis.  She came up with "lost in the mall".  Over the Thanksgiving break, her students were to plant ideas in their relatives heads.  It culminated by planting the idea that they had been lost in the mall at a young age.  A while later they were asked to recall this experience and with vivid detail, a statistically significant percentage (25%) recalled and expanded this story that was planted in their heads.

Slater's work was in the time of the early 1990s when people were all about memory repression.  Her work was widely criticized as not proving anything significant.  People were sticking to their Freudian attitudes.  

She gives another account of Paul Ingram whose daughters while at a religious retreat accused him of sexually abusing them years in the past.  After days of interrogation Ingram finally broke down and confessed that he had done many things to the two.  It was found that Ingram would alter his mind to believe almost anything, but that did not save him from jail time.

Loftus's questions beg at the whether we have authenticity or we simply make up quite everything we remember.  She fought with Freud's view of repression throughout her career.

Discussion:
This chapter made me think a lot of the things that have gone in and out of my memory.  I have always said I have a bad memory, but recently in my latter college years have been able to recall many events from my past.  I was able to question whether or not they actually happened.  For all general purposes as long as it just concerns myself, I think the things I remember are reason enough to actually believe they did happen to me, for what else do we have but our own memory?  If we cannot rely on that, what is there to say?  Whether something happened or not, we still have the memory of it, and therefore could still be traumatized for it.  That is not to say that other people should pay the penalty for that, but healing is still needed for experiences in the mind.