In Recovered Memories of Abuse, Drs. Kenneth Pope and Laura Brown examined some of the premises and assumptions underlying the False Memory Syndrome (FMS). In a previous post in this series, I highlighted two of their four major concerns. The first deals with the nature of traumatic memory as opposed to ordinary memory. In a previously mentioned experiment, subjects had to keep a diary of daily events and include false items. They then had to identify, at a future date, which entries where true, and which were false. Because the memories were mundane, plausible events, the subjects had difficulty in recalling which items were true, and which were false. But if the subject had included a sufficiently traumatic experience (e.g., my sibling died, or I got fired) as the falsity, he or she would have considerably less difficulty in seeing it as untrue, for a number of reasons.* Thus, when examining the relevance of research offered to prove the existence of FMS, they noted that it either lacked a component of trauma, or, such as with the Lost in a Shopping Mall experiment, failed to establish the adequacy of the trauma. As noted, from her previously cited Scientific American article, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most forefront pro-FMS researchers, conceded that getting lost in a shopping mall did not engender nearly the type of trauma experience by those victimized by childhood sexual abuse.

The second issue raised by Drs. Pope and Brown dealt with the relevance of the methodology used by pro-FMS researchers to the actual therapeutic process. Again, the authors indicate a number of factors that demonstrate clear differences between the procedures, goals and ethics of therapy and those of the Lost in a Shopping Mall (LitM) study. As stated earlier, the goals of these two endeavors is clearly different. Therapy, on the one hand, tries to heal the patient. Experimentation, on the other, represents an attempt to gain information that supports or negates the hypothesis. That deception would be the main goal of the LitM study, no one can deny. While one can imagine that competent and scrupulous therapists sometimes deceive their patients, or attempt to, the deception itself is not the goal of treatment; at least, it shouldn’t be.

Pope and Brown’s third major point is, in my mind, perhaps the most critical:

3.  Has this line of research assumed that verbal reports provided to researchers are the equivalent of actual memories. [Dr. Nicholas] Spanos suggested that changes in report in suggestibility research may represent compliance with social demand conditions of the research design rather than actual changes in what is recalled.

One thing about narrative: with respect to validity, memory trumps belief. Borrowing from an early post on this blog, imagine that you have knowledge that your married friend has just checked into the Motel Amore with person X, and out of concern, you alerted his/her spouse. Compare the impact of the statement "I think your spouse might have checked into the Motel Amore with person X," to the impact of the statement "I was driving by the Motel Amore when I saw your spouse entering a room with person X."

According to the first statement, you have a belief that the event occurred, but no memory of it, since you did not witness it. It really doesn’t matter if your belief is based on compelling evidence (e.g., person X told you about the planned tryst, or you discovered their names in the motel register while out on your own romantic rendezvous, etc.), the cuckolded spouse can easily dismiss the claim as a mistake, or the result of an overactive imagination, or a practical joke, or just about anything else. But in the second statement, you have asserted the authority of memory. In that case, there’s much less to dispute other than sensory perception (e.g., "You just thought you saw someone who looked like...."), or out-and-out truthfulness (e.g., "You’re lying").

In other words, telling someone that we witnessed, and thus remember something carries far more credibility than saying that we have a strong belief in something. At the same time, we can bolster the believability of our statements by claiming that we distinctly remember them as true events. Thus, to an outside observer, our statements of belief could very well come across as statements of experience. Yet internally, we can understand that what we know, what we believe, and what we actually remember could be three separate things. And in such a case, the version that often comes out is guided by social demands often related to power inequities.

In fact, one can prove this has been the case, especially with respect to the recanting child witnesses of the McMartin Preschool trial. Bradley Brunon, one of the children testifying for the prosecution, knew that his statements on the witness stand did not match his own memory of events. His false testimony resulted from his desire to please his parents, the prosecutor and his therapists, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times dated 25 January 1985. In 2005, Kyle Zirpolo, another McMartin child witness (then an adult), also admitted lying on the stand. And like Brunon twenty years earlier, Zirpolo stressed that what he related as memory was not his actual recollection of events:

I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest....But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do. And I thought they wanted me to help protect my little brother and sister who went to McMartin.

Here, Zirpolo knew that he had not witnessed anything untoward at McMartin, but understood that the charges against Ray Buckey were serious, and if true could pose a danger, especially to his younger siblings. It’s clear that he believed that Buckey was dangerous. At the same time, he remembered everything as normal, despite what he said on the stand.

Of course, perjury against anyone is a serious injustice to all of us. And we (hopefully) can sympathize with the plight of those falsely accused, especially when emotions run high, and the pressures to convict are enormous. But while some would portray Zirpolo as the poster child for False Memory Syndrome, his case resembles nothing of the kind. There was no false--or in his case even distorted--memory. In fact, the falsity of his statements came about by dismissing his memory in deference to authority. Thus, there were only false statements that complied with pressing social demands.

In other research done to offer evidence of FMS, we can see similar compliance with social demands as a very plausible explanation. And in the next post, I’ll demonstrate this by re-examining some of the pro-FMS studies presented earlier.

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*For example, in a study by Drs. Kathy Pezdek (Claremont Graduate University), Iris Blandon-Gitlin (Cal State, Fullerton), Shirley Lam (Claremont Graduate University), Rhiannon Ellis Hart (Hampshire College), and Jonathan Schooler (University of British Columbia) titled "Is Knowing Believing? The Role of Plausibility and Background Knowledge in Planting False Beliefs about the Personal Past," the authors find that the likelihood of implanting a false memory or belief decreases as the implausibility of the event increases.