Lost In The Mall Summary

In chapter 8, Lost in the Mall, Slater tells us about Elizabeth Loftus. She is a professor at the University of Washington and an experimental psychologist who does research about human memory. She learned about to men who believed different things about human memory and decided to challenge them. The first was Plato. He believed that in a form of absolute or ideal memory. He thought memory would appear completely preserved. The second was Freud. He claimed that memory was a reduplication of a dream and fact. He believed memories were repressed. Loftus believed that people tend to confuse things between memory and imagination. She wanted to prove people could distort memories and also make up fake memories. False memory is an apparent recollection

But what if those photographs were altered? Researcher wanted to see if they could use a fake photo and see if people would accept that as a true event. The researchers showed four people three photographs that were true and one false photograph. When the researchers interviewed the four participants, they found that 50% remembered the false event in the photograph. These studies showed that a substantial amount of false memories can be made using photographs. This experiment proved that memories aren’t very reliable and that photographs may be the best way to truly remember an event. Photographs can’t be easily disregarded or

The people who believed this statement made up 30% of the study. They believed that they had really gotten sick after eating hard boiled eggs. They were then asked if they liked a list of foods, which included foods like hard boiled eggs and egg salad sandwiches. It was found that the people who believed to have gotten sick from the hard boiled eggs claimed that they liked hard boiled eggs less and didn’t want to eat egg salad sandwiches as much. This experiment proved that false memories had the same consequences as true