Elizabeth Loftus Case Summary

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Description In the website that I watch was Ted Talks about Elizabeth Loftus, who talked about false memory and how reliable they are. She started off by talking about a legal case of a guy named Steve Titus, was 31 years old and was a manager at a restaurant. He lived a normal life until he went out and got stopped by a police officer and was investigated because a person identifies him as a rapist. So, he was convicted and ended up in jail and this is where his life ended. Later, he investigated his own innocence and his journalist found the real rapist and they set him free. Titus life did not end up here, he was dealing with anger issues and lost everything he had and later died of stress-related heart attack. This case is an example of a study of false memory. …show more content…

She studies false memory when people remember things that they did not happen or happened. In other words, they remember things differently. She has studied the case of Steve Titus and stated that he is not the only victim who gets convicted based on someone else, information and that there are 300 hundred of innocent people and 300 defendants who were convicted of the crime that they did not do. This person usually spends about 10 to 30 years of jail time for the crime that they supposedly did and most of these cases were due to false memory (Loftus, 2013). Loftus discussed how memory works differently and gave examples of how people communicate the information about their experiences and can change the memory based on the person memories. Loftus did many studies of psychotherapy and in the studied; she planted false memories on the subjects. She found many interesting things based on what she studies and she thinks that false memory is not bad, but what she did learn is that just because people tell you things with expression and important details it does not mean it happened (Loftus, 2013). Related