Elizabeth Loftus

Elizabeth F. Loftus, born in 1944, is an American psychologist whose reputation rests on her studies of the misinformation effect, false memory, and her critiques of recovered memory therapies. Her work has shaped how memory reliability is understood, especially in legal settings, and she has testified as an expert in more than 300 trials.

Loftus grew up in a Jewish family in Bel Air, California, as Elizabeth Fishman. Her father was a doctor, her mother a librarian. When Loftus was 14, her mother drowned. She earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and psychology from UCLA in 1966, then a PhD in mathematical psychology from Stanford in 1970, with a thesis on problem-solving difficulty in computer-based tasks.

From 1970 to 1973, she worked as a cognitive psychologist at the New School for Social Research in New York City, after growing tired of calibrating math and word problems for fifth-graders. She had also been investigating semantic memory with a Stanford professor. In 1973, she moved to the University of Washington as an assistant professor, staying until 2001. There, she shifted from lab work to real-world criminal cases.

Around that time, the U.S. Department of Transportation funded research on car crashes. In her first such experiment, Loftus showed 45 students videos of crashes and asked them to estimate speeds. When the question used the word “collided,” the average estimate was 32 mph; with “hit each other,” it was 34 mph; with “smashed each other,” it was 41 mph. She concluded that the phrasing of questions can reconstruct memory of an event.

In 1974, she published two articles about conflicting eyewitness accounts in a murder trial and the reliability of testimony. Lawyers began contacting her about current cases, launching her paid consulting work. Early attempts to testify as an expert were rejected by judges, but in June 1975 she gave the first expert testimony on eyewitness identification in Washington State.

In 1990, George Franklin was tried for a 20-year-old murder. His daughter testified based on a recovered memory from therapy. The defense hired Loftus, who argued the daughter’s memory was false, citing an experiment where people mixed up a real crime video with a fake news report. But the prosecutor forced Loftus to admit she had never studied memories like the daughter’s—her studies showed misidentification of strangers, not of one’s own father, and did not prove memories could be wholly invented. Franklin was convicted, though later overturned on appeal.

In 1991, high-profile cases of recovered memories of parental molestation caught Loftus’s attention. She read books like *The Courage to Heal*, which urged therapists to probe for childhood incest. That year, she was named an honorary fellow of the British Psychological Society.

Also around 1991, her undergraduate student Jim Coan developed the “lost in the mall” technique. Coan gave his younger brother three true childhood stories and one false story about being lost in a mall; the brother believed all were true and added details. Loftus replicated this, finding 25% of subjects believed a false event. This study was criticized by Lynn Crook and Martha Dean for its recruitment ethics.

In the Jane Doe case starting in 1997, Loftus and Melvin J. Guyer raised serious doubts about the background and validity of the original research. She has served on the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society’s 2011 conference. She has written books including *The Myth of Repressed Memory* and *Witness for the Defense*, and has consulted for lawyers in cases involving Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Angelo Buono, and Robert Durst.