A number of professionals criticized the relevance of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus’ Lost in a Shopping Mall Study to the false memory debate, often citing research that indicated a difference between traumatic and ordinary memory.  They also raised questions about the ethics of the study, asking whether or not introducing a “mild trauma” is still trauma.  Then again, if it isn’t trauma that’s being induced by false memory, then what’s the relevance to people who report having solid memories of trauma, and continue to do so.  In a 2000 paper titled “‘Lost in a Shopping Mall’–A Breach of Professional Ethics,” Lynn Crook and Martha Dean point out that in the initial study of twenty-four subjects, only seven indicated a “full-or partial” recollection of the memory, one of whom changed her mind later–not an especially high batting average; especially when you talk about such things as “partial recollection” (on a range of one to eleven), or take into account the accuracy of the corroborating family member’s memory.*

Drs. Nicholas Spanos, Kenneth Pope and Laura Brown posed the additional question of whether The Lost in a Shopping Mall inaccurately characterized social compliance as false memory.   In her account of the genesis of the project, Dr. Loftus gave an ironic example of this.  While conversing with a colleague at a party about the possibility of memory implantation, he called over his eight-year old daughter to see if they could convince her that she had been lost in a shopping mall when no such incident occurred.  After hearing a “third set of corroborating details,” she affirmed her father’s story.  This led Loftus to conclude:

I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed.  In five minutes, with a few suggestions and minor prods from her father, Jenny had accepted a false memory and embellished it with details of her own.  She remembered being lost, she remembered looking all over for her father, and she remembered being scared.  In less time than it took to cook a hard-boiled egg, we had created a false memory.

In this example, one has to note the context of this conversation between Loftus, the colleague, and his daughter.  It’s a party.  It’s a social event.  Jenny might not understand the reason for her father’s insistence in perpetuating a story they both know to be false.  But like most children, she would have understood that affirming his version of events would please him–just like McMartin witnesses Bradly Brunon and Kyle Zirpolo knew that their knowingly false statements would please their parents, the prosecutors and other professionals.  After three attempts to convince the child to accept her father’s story, she might even have finally caught on that by maintaining her original claim, she might make her dad look foolish or dishonest in front of a co-worker.

In other words, we have far more compelling explanation of Jenny’s response than instantaneous false memory implantation.  Even if we come to accept that Jenny came to believe her father’s tale, we would have had little proof that she actually remembered it.  On the other hand, we have an abundance of evidence to suggest that she was reacting to social demands, chief of which her parent’s expectations.

In his 1997 paper “Lost in a Shopping Mall: An Experience with Controversial Research,” Dr. Loftus’ former student and research assistant Jim Coan described the aftermath of his association to the Lost in a Shopping Mall study.  He went into some detail about the negative reactions of peers and colleagues.  The criticism against Coan stemmed from the fact that he used his brother Chris as an experimental subject in the Lost in a Shopping Mall study, before such a study was given the greenlight by the University of Washington’s Human Subjects Committee.:

Though I did not know that several of my supervisors [at the Kings County Crisis Clinic in Seattle] were full or part time therapists either in private practice or at local agencies, it never occurred to me that any of them might feel any hostility toward what I had done with my brother, or what I was currently doing for my honors work.  With this perspective, I went ahead and told people I had gotten to know on my regular shift about the New York Times article, and in doing so enraged my supervisor. Almost immediately, my supervisor began to grill me with questions about how I could possibly assert that a memory for being lost in a shopping mall could be anything like a memory for being sexually abused and beaten all one’s life.  I agreed they would be very different!  He went on to ask me what I thought of the fact that what I was doing would eventually hurt and damage so many people. Not knowing how to respond, I tried to assure him that I didn’t want to hurt anybody, and that I wasn’t saying anything except memories could be implanted.

Later in the paper, Coan stated that a negative reputation followed him to graduate school at the University of Arizona, saying, “I was not treated with gushing affection.”   

If we take Coan at his word–and we have no reason not to–then we realize that he saw himself as a victim of intellectual prejudice, and professional scorn.  And so, it makes sense that one defense that he offered in this paper consisted of his brother Chris’ affirmation that the false memory not only seemed real to him at the time, but also years later:                   

While writing this article, I asked my brother once again whether the memory still seemed real, and whether he felt badly about being the first participant [discounting the aforementioned Jenny].   Chris reports that the memory does indeed still seem real, and that he has never felt badly about participating in the study.

Chris, undoubtedly older by this time, could very well have understood the criticisms against his brother regarding this research.  Confirming both (1) the conclusions and (2) the ethics of the study could very well have given assurance to his elder sibling, whether his statements were accurate or not.  Moreover, by giving information repeated in this paper, Chris offered a defense of the activities leading to James Coan’s pariah status. 

If you have siblings, you can probably empathize with the need to come to their defense.  I obviously cannot say that Chris Coan’s assertion that the memory seems real is inaccurate, nor would I try.  None of us can know what goes on in the head of another person.  At the same time, I cannot see this as proof of false memory implantation, knowing that compliance to social demands (i.e., the protection of a brother) could also explain this response.  In other words, we cannot use anecdotal evidence of this type to claim that one definitely had a memory implanted, no matter how vehemently the subject asserts.

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*Crook, Lynn S. and Martha C. Dean.  1999.  “‘Lost in a Shopping Mall’–A Breach of Ethics.”  Ethics and Behavior, v. 9 (1): 39-50.

**Coan, James A.  1997.  “Lost in a Shopping Mall: An Experience with Controversial Research.” Ethics and Behavior, 7 (3): 271-284.

To read later posts in this series, click here.