Getting lost in a mall is not — as Loftus implicitly suggests by citing her study — analogous to incestuous abuse. In a variation on the mall study published in 1997, researchers sought to emphasize this distinction by presenting subjects with one true memory and two false ones: being lost in the mall and receiving a rectal enema. The hypothesis was that the less plausible event, the enema, wouldn’t create false memories so easily. Three of 20 subjects “remembered” having been lost in the mall. Zero remembered the enema.
“The typical response was ‘No ****ing way. That didn’t happen,’ ” says Kathy Pezdek, a cognitive psychologist and an expert in eyewitness memory, who conducted the experiment.
Coan, Loftus’s former student and now a neuroscientist and psychology professor at the University of Virginia, has decidedly mixed feelings about the experiment he inadvertently spearheaded. “I’m slow enough on the uptake that it took me a while to realize that the study I was doing was making people who had been sexually abused feel like I was their enemy,” he tells me. “That was completely devastating to me.” Although he has been asked to testify about false memory in countless court cases, Coan has always refused. He just doesn’t think the mall study is sufficiently relevant. In her excitement, he thinks, Loftus may have “mischaracterized” what started out as an undergraduate assignment for extra credit.
------------
There’s a question that has bothered me ever since I learned of the Lost in the Mall study: How did researchers know that what the subjects were describing was a genuine “false memory” and not just a story they agreed with? If prompted, I too can imagine myself as a child lost in a shopping mall, looking frantically for my mother. I can make myself see it, and if my mother told me it happened, I’d probably believe her. But does that really count as a memory, or is it just a mental picture — something I can see in my head? How can anyone outside my brain tell the difference unless they were there?
The consensus among memory scientists is that you can’t. This is one of the fundamental weaknesses of studies that model the Lost in the Mall methodology, says Chris Brewin, a clinical psychologist and professor at University College London. “Judgments about whether somebody’s got a false memory or not are almost always made by the experimenters and not by the person themselves,” he says. “Almost never have they actually asked the person, ‘How convinced are you that this actually happened to you and that the pictures you have in your head correspond to that event?’ ” The Loftus mall study asked subjects to rate the clarity of their memory — how vivid the picture in their head was — as well as their confidence that they’d be able to remember more detail if given more time. Is that the same thing as measuring one’s belief in a memory, the feeling that it actually took place in the way one remembers it?
--------------
Based on Freyds explination of betrayal trauma theory, it is clear why the lost in the mall experiment has no relevance to her conception of psychogenic amnesia.
--------------
I figured out a way to clearly state my larger point.
The philosophy of science is currently being used in the western academic field of academic/scientific psychology (WAP) to rationalize the invalidation of inate/introspective or a priori information. No other academic/scientific field of study so wholly debases and denigrates a priori information in the same way.
This statement is directly connected to the issues around false/recovered memories, but I won't go there right now.
--------------
It is stated that the difference between psychology and sociology is that psychology is the study of one person
Psychologists wholly depend on the statistical anayalsis of observed information to evaluate the validity of their hypothesis. However their methodology is based on a premise which has never been observed (one person existing)
Is that a problem at all?
