Elizabeth Loftus Persuaded a Quarter of Adults They'd Been Lost in a Mall as Kids

Elizabeth Loftus, a memory researcher at the University of Washington, designed the "Lost in the Mall" experiment with her undergraduate James Coan in the early 1990s. The procedure was modest. Each subject received a booklet of four short stories about events from their own childhood, supplied by a relative — first day of school, a trip to the zoo — except one. The fourth story, a paragraph about the subject getting lost in a shopping mall around age five and being rescued by an elderly stranger, was made up. Subjects were asked to read each story, write what they additionally remembered, and rank how vivid each recollection felt.

The formal study, published with Jacqueline Pickrell in 1995, ran 24 participants. Five of them — roughly a quarter — "remembered" the planted event and added their own details: the color of the mall floor, the woman who found them, the relief of seeing their mother again. In a variant, when asked which of their booklet stories was false, several subjects pointed at a real one. The technique scaled. Subsequent studies in other labs implanted memories of being attacked by a vicious dog, knocking over a punch bowl at a wedding, taking a hot-air-balloon ride.

The finding ran directly into the recovered-memory therapy movement of the 1990s, in which therapists were eliciting detailed memories of childhood abuse from adult patients and treating them as veridical. Loftus testified for the defense in dozens of resulting trials, accumulating both expert credibility and significant personal hostility. Pezdek and Hodges in 1999 found the implantation effect was weaker for implausible events; the underlying lesson — that memories aren't recordings, and confident memories aren't necessarily true — has held up.