Lost in the mall technique
The "Lost in the Mall" technique is an experimental procedure that was used to demonstrate that confabulations can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects. It was first developed by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus in an effort to explain how normal people can claim to have recovered memories of improbable experiences.
Study methodology
Loftus and her student Jacqueline Pickrell performed an experiment in which they gave participants four short narratives describing childhood events, all supposedly provided by family members, and asked them to try to recall them. Unbeknownst to the participants, one of the narratives, describing a time when the subject was lost in a mall when they were a child, was false. The narrative described an instance when the subject was five or six years old lost in a shopping mall for an extended period of time before finally being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his or her family. The narrative was based upon actual family shopping trips and incorporated plausible details provided by the relative. In the study, 25% of the participants reported to be able to remember this event even though it never actually occurred. Many people were able to provide embellishing details that were not supplied by the investigators. Loftus interpreted this to mean that the act of imagining the events led to the creation of false memories.[1]
The lost in the mall experiment has been replicated and extended with different ages of subjects.[2]
Criticisms of methodology and conclusions
Some conclusions drawn based on the lost in the mall technique (specifically that leading questions can create false memories of child sexual abuse) have been criticized. In an extension of the experiment, Pezdek, using the subjects' family members to do the interviewing, was able to replicate Loftus' findings that memories of being lost in the mall could be created and were more likely to occur in young children, but a much smaller number of children reported false memories of a painful and embarrassing enema.[2] Kenneth Pope questioned the comparability of the technique's ability to generate a false memory with the ability of a therapist to create a pseudomemory of child rape, as well as possible confounding variables within the study.[3] Lynn Crook and Martha Dean question the application of the study to the creation of false memories during therapy and criticize the study for methodological errors.[4]
Loftus has responded to Crook and Dean's criticisms, pointing to the exaggerations, omissions and errors in the description of the technique, the general lack of scientific competence of their reply and mis-statements about the actual findings of her study, describing Crook and Dean's article as a "partisan essay."[5] Loftus also states that Crook's article follows a long series of efforts to discredit her work publicly and personally.[5][6]
See also
- ^ Loftus, E.F.; Pickrell JE (1995). "The formation of false memories" (pdf). Psychiatric Annals 25: 720–725. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/loftusmem1.pdf.
- ^ a b Pezdek, K; Hodge, D. (July–August 1999). "Planting false childhood memories: The role of event plausibility" (pdf). Child Development 70 (4): 887–895. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00064. http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/bfaber/CSP502/2-Pezdek-1999.pdf.
- ^ Pope, K. (1996). "Memory, Abuse, and Science: Questioning Claims About the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic". American Psychologist 51 (9): 957–74. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.51.9.957. PMID 8819364. http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=HvMJ8y7hTLwzJKhQcXtBzn5T7hD51pStTy7SkQkzTNz51hB3Shgg!1063769811?docId=96531378. Retrieved 2008-01-31. "Does the trauma specified in the lost-in-the-mall experiment seem comparable to the trauma forming the basis of false memory syndrome? Loftus (1993) described the implanted traumatic event in the shopping-mall experiment as follows: "Chris was convinced by his older brother Jim, that he had been lost in a shopping mall when he was five years old" (p. 532). Does this seem, for example, a reasonable analogy for a five-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her father?....Is it possible that the findings are an artifact of this particular design, for example, that the older family member claims to have been present when the event occurred and to have witnessed it, a claim the therapist can never make? To date, replications and extensions of this study have tended to use a similar methodology; that is, either the older family member makes the suggestions in his or her role as the experimenter's confederate, or the experimenter presents the suggestion as being the report of an older family member, thus creating a surrogate confederate."
- ^ Crook, L.; Dean, Martha (1999). "Lost in a Shopping Mall—A Breach of Professional Ethics". Ethics & Behavior 9 (1): 39–50. doi:10.1207/s15327019eb0901_3. PMID 11657487. http://users.owt.com/crook/memory/. Retrieved 2008-01-18. "An analysis of the mall study shows that beyond the external misrepresentations, internal scientific methodological errors cast doubt on the validity of the claims that have been attributed to the mall study within scholarly and legal arenas. The minimal involvement—or, in some cases, negative impact—of collegial consultation, academic supervision, and peer review throughout the evolution of the mall study are reviewed."
- ^ a b Loftus, E.F. (1999). "Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings" (pdf). Ethics & Behaviour 9 (1): 51–60. doi:10.1207/s15327019eb0901_4. PMID 11657488. http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall07/brunnquelld/psy8542/Session%2015/Loftus%20-Lost%20in%20the%20Mall%20-%20Misrepresentations%20and%20misubders.pdf.
- ^ Editorial (1996). Dispatch from the memory war. Psychology Today. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19960501-000001.html.
References