Professor Elizabeth Loftus discusses education, growing up, Do Justice and Let the Sky Fall, graduate school training, experimental and mathematical psychology, and a host of other topics. Here is part 3.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have earned numerous awards, but the AAAS award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility seems most relevant to me. In your acceptance speech you state, “We live in perilous times for science…and in order for scientists to preserve their freedoms they have a responsibility…to bring our science to the public arena and to speak out as forcefully as we can against even the most cherished beliefs that reflect unsubstantiated myths.” I quote this in an interview with Dr. Daniel Bernstein and ask, “How important do you see criticizing ‘unsubstantiated myths’ in ‘perilous times’ for Science?” He says, “I think that this is excellent advice. Science has a responsibility to “give back” to the communities and cultures that invest in it. Scientists can and should correct myths whenever the opportunity arises.” Can you expand on this idea of scientific responsibility to society?
Professor Elizabeth Loftus: You know, I think he put it beautifully. Not everyone has to do everything, I think collectively we can all contribute to giving back to the society that supported the scientific work. Some people are going to be good at getting the experiments done and published in journals, and they’re uncomfortable speaking to the press or speaking in the context of legal cases. Other people are comfortable doing that. Some people are not comfortable writing for lay audiences. They only want to write for concise scientific journals. Collectively, I think there is something of a responsibility in an ideal world for people to want to give back.
Jacobsen: Whom do you consider your biggest influences? Could you recommend any seminal or important books/articles by them?
Loftus: Back in Graduate School, I had a professor that I did some research with on semantic memory that really taught me how to be an experimental psychologist. To be able to design a study with him, conduct and gather the data, analyze the data, and write up a publication. That was a great benefit for me. That collaboration was with a social psychologist named Jonathan Freedman. That was an important influence in terms of turning me into an independent experimental psychologist. I would say, in terms of people that I have never met whose work has probably set the stage for the tradition in which I work, Bartlett from England who was famous for his work on reconstructive memory. I see my work in the tradition of reconstructive memory. He was an important forefather.
If people want to read about memory distortion, I think they may want to read something more recent. I have a book by Brainerd and Reyna. It is rather advanced, but it is called The Science of False Memory. It is sort of everything you would ever want to know about false memories up to 2005 or whenever that book was published. For your readers, if they wanted something easy and fun for reading, I would recommend The Memory Doctor in Slate.com written by Will Saletan. That will give you a small slice of memory research. If you want more, you could probably read The Science of False Memory.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the most important point(s) of Psychology as a discipline? In particular, what do you consider the most important point about cognitive psychology?
Loftus: I do not think I want to go there. (Laughs) There are just too many. I have just been focused on the study of memory. I think the study memory distortion is an important area because of its practical and theoretical implications. I think some recent work in a completely different area has to do with learning and memory, in a classroom or an educational setting. The work that shows that if you test people, they learn better than if you just ask them to study again. All these findings on testing effects are interesting and we will see more work in that area.
This of course has many people interested in memory and neuroscience, and brain imaging. It is not something I do, unless I am collaborating with someone who does, but we will see where that will lead. It is certainly the subject of a lot of current research.
Jacobsen: Three years ago, I informally asked Dr. Anthony Greenwald, “Where do you see Psychology going?” He said the frontier lies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, a first generation of researchers, like the first round of soldiers marching out of the trenches, will fall – making all the necessary mistakes. After that point, the next generation of researchers will have learned from those mistakes to make deep progress. In the same stream of thought three years later, “Where do you see Psychology going?”
Loftus: That is interesting because he has been quite successful with the implicit association test and all kinds of ramifications in uses of it, but he does not seem to be going in a neuroscience direction. However, he is a smart guy, whose speculation I would invest in.
People are enamored with this neuroimaging stuff. I do see a lot more research. I was about to say progress, but I do not know yet. The neuroscience of cognitive psychology, there has been a lot of discussion in our interdisciplinary teams, people seem to be enamored with the idea that if you bring together people from all different types of perspectives and fields, then you can come together to tackle problems. Will we see more of that – more funding of those type of enterprises? More research, more publications, involving these large interdisciplinary teams. It is a speculation, but it is an educated one given how enamored people seem to be of this notion.
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Original publication on www.in-sightjournal.com.
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Image Credit: Getty Images.