Arguably the most widely cited study demonstrating the implanting of false memory was conducted by FMSF Scientific Advisory Board member Dr. Elizabeth Loftus.  As she has written in a number of pieces over the years, and has spoken about publicly in the national media, her inspiration for the experiment came from a couple of sources.  As a memory expert, her research on memory distortion began as a young scholar back in the 1970s.  But the “germ” of the idea, as she called it, came about during a 1991 birthday party.  Also in attendance were a friend and his twelve-year old daughter.  As Loftus described the subject matter of her studies, the friend called over his child and nonchalantly asked if she had remembered the time she got lost in the shopping mall as a little girl.  After some “prodding,” the daughter not only recalled the incident in front of Loftus, but elaborated on it in great detail.

Only one problem: according to Loftus’ friend, the incident never occurred.

That fall, Dr. Loftus extended her research by offering extra-credit to undergraduate students in her cognitive psychology course who could implant false memories on people they knew.  As she wrote in a paper titled “Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings” (Ethics and Behavior, v. 9, n.1, 1999):

I would typically give my class an extra credit homework assignment along these lines: I told them to go out and try to distort a memory or to create in someone’s mind a ‘memory’ for something that did not exist.  My hope was that they would discover how relatively easy or hard this could be, depending on the conditions, and that once a memory was acquired in this way, it can seem as real to a person as a memory that is a result of one’s own ordinary perceptual sensations. 

Some of the students who took up the extra-credit offer came back with stunning results, among them Linda Binet, who convinced her daughter that she’d gotten lost on a ranch, and Jim Coan, who convinced his younger brother Chris that he, in fact, had gotten lost in a local shopping mall.  For good measure, he recorded the interview.

Coan, who would later go on to do graduate work in psychology at the University of Arizona, admitted that at the time he took the cognitive psychology course it was only “tangential” to his real goal of attending medical school.  In a 1997 paper titled “Lost in a Shopping Mall: An Experience with Controversial Research” (Ethics and Behavior, v. 7, n.3, 1997), he chronicled his meteoric rise from undergrad with tangential interest to academic superstar when Loftus played the recording Coan brothers's conversation for the media.  As he wrote:

Only months before, I had been a completely unknown undergraduate student in Psychology among hundreds.  I had been unable to enter the University of Washington without first receiving an Associates Degree from a community college due to my poor high school grades.  I had wanted to go to medical school, but did not believe it was possible.  Suddenly, I was working closely to one of the biggest names in psychology [namely, Dr. Loftus], and seeing my name appear in the New York Times.

Extra-credit assignments and party conversation offers anecdotal evidence, of course.  But in order for anyone in the academic world to take the concept seriously, Dr. Loftus and her colleagues would need to embark on a formal study.  Trouble was, getting the approval from the university, for it risked violating ethical standards.  Aware of this, Loftus explained in her 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memories: 

The trick was to design a study powerful enough to prove that it is possible to implant a false memory while also winning the approval of the university’s Human Subjects Committee, which reviews proposed research projects to ensure that they will not be harmful to participants.

Normally, when dealing with field research of any kind, academics have to learn and test on (and in my case become certified in) issues pertaining to human subject experimentation.  The reasons for this are long and historic.  But to cut to the chase, universities around the US instituted such procedures after a number of experiments (often psychological ones) actually traumatized or harmed volunteer subjects.  For this reason, studies done on trauma and memory require highly specialized experts (e.g., Dr. James Chu, Harvard Medical School) who can examine patients in vivo, or as the traumatic situation arises.  After all, it would be unethical to induce trauma artificially in order to observe its effects on the volunteer.  Here, Dr. Loftus is intending to impose a mildly traumatic memory onto someone, or to get them to believe that something that something stressful happened to them in the past.

The study approved by the University of Washington consisted of (1) an interview with parents or relatives of subjects about childhood incidents, (2) the selection of three such incidents, (3) the inclusion of these three incidents and a fourth one about getting lost in a shopping mall, and (4) the subject’s response.  The researchers gave twenty-four subjects (ages ranging from eighteen to fifty-three) the four narratives (the three supplied by family, and the shopping mall story) and asked them to respond to each one.  If they didn’t remember an incident, they were instructed to simply say that they didn’t remember it.

The results: seven of the twenty-four, or almost 29% of the subjects said that they had a “partial or full” recollection of being lost in a mall, contrary to the recall of a parent or other relative.  In a follow-up interview, 25% claimed to have still remembered the incident in whole or part.

In this research, Dr. Loftus carefully pointed out that a memory of getting lost in a shopping mall is different than, say, childhood rape.  According to her, the point of the experience wasn’t so much to duplicate trauma as it was to point out that people can implant false memories on others.  As she wrote for Scientific American:

Of course, being lost, however frightening, is not the same as being abused. But the lost-in-the-mall study is not about real experiences of being lost; it is about planting false memories of being lost. The paradigm shows a way of instilling false memories and takes a step toward allowing us to understand how this might happen in real-world settings. Moreover, the study provides evidence that people can be led to remember their past in different ways, and they can even be coaxed into ‘remembering’ entire events that never happened.”

That last quote is particularly important, for Dr. Loftus is here qualifying the significance of the study itself.  In defense of Dr. Loftus against her critics, one can fairly say that she isn’t correlating getting lost in a mall to childhood sexual abuse, but rather showing that, under the conditions she has outlined, people can have false ideas suggested to them by others.  At the same time, however, the importance of this research has often been pumped up by critics and proponents of the FMS hypothesis.  The latter feels that this gives concrete proof of the ability of psychologists to coerce patients into remembering wild things, hysterical things, ugly things that never happened.  Furthermore, the proponents of FMS have used this study to assert that this type of suggestion is very easy to do; the doctor could, in fact, do it unconsciously. 

For critics , the Lost in the Mall study typifies the ethical, methodological and reasoning problems that plague the FMS hypothesis.