Kieran Healy

Speak, Memory

Kevin Drum talks about research on memory and memory distortion by Elizabeth Loftus. She looks at how false memories can be created with a bit of suggestion.

My good friend Mara Mather at U.C. Santa Cruz also studies memory distortion. Her work is interesting because it focuses on how people remember the details of their own choices and decisions. She suggests that there’s a tradeoff between accurate remembering and current well-being. We’d regret things a lot more if we had the benefit of hindsight and could remember all the details of the better choice we might have made. Some of her papers are online and are well worth reading. I was a research subject in the one on Misrememberance of Options Past. As far as I recall, anyway.

Daniel Schacter has an excellent book out now on memory, in which he spends considerable time summarizing some of Loftus’ past work. Based on some of these findings, it sure seems like police departments and the U.S. Attorney General’s office should take careful note, so that they might improve their witness interrogation procedures.