4 ms·
> there is no good science that shows people can be prompted to create false memories of deeply traumatic or personal events such as you are saying. There is de
by dbspin 3y ago
> there is no good science that shows people can be prompted to create false memories of deeply traumatic or personal events such as you are saying. There is definitely no good science showing that recovered memories are more likely to be false than true.
You're absolutely correct that theres a poverty of experimental research in implanting / recovering memories of sexual abuse. It's difficult to devise experiments with any ecological validity in this area, for obvious reasons. However we have the existence proof of thousands of such allegations proven to be false [1]. For obvious reasons, experimental studies on implanted memories of sexual abuse would be unethical, but less than half of US clinical psychologists believe repressed memories can be recovered accurately, and 95% agree that recovered memories can sometimes be false [2].
While child sexual abuse is horrifically common. Given the age of the victim during the alleged offence, and the delay in recovery, this particular case seems extremely unlikely to be true - in the absence of any collaborating evidence.
> Much of the rhetoric around the potential for falsely recovered memories comes from a foundation that was founded by an alleged abuser and has a loose relationship with scientific truth and a fairly sketchy history of protecting child abusers
I'm much more familiar with the work of Elizabeth Loftus on the construction of memory than I am with any media facing foundation. Her lab research shows it's trivially easy to create memories of early childhood experience - although again, she never researched implanting memories of abuse. She also did some great work on demand characteristics in psychotherapy - i.e.: unconsciously producing behaviour performatively for a therapist, such as symptoms or false memories.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170710006/texas-continues-to-exonerate-people-who-were-wrongly-convicted-during-satanic-pa https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170710006/texas-continues-to...
[2] https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/false-memories-childhood-abuse https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/false-memories-childhood...
[3] https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/KanterKohlenbergLoftusCogTher04.pdf https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/KanterKohlenbergLoftusCogTh...
- shkkmo 3y ago> However we have the existence proof of thousands of such allegations proven to be false [1] That's nothing like what is alleged here. A mentally ill mother pressuring a son into giving false testimony is very different from an adult "recovering" a memory. > Given the age of the victim during the alleged offence, and the delay in recovery, this particular case seems extremely unlikely to be true Based on what? > I'm much more familiar with the work of Elizabeth Loftus on the construction of memory than I am with any media facing foundation. She was recruited as a founding board member of that foundation and makes a lot of money off of the idea of implanting false memories as a expert witness. > Her lab research shows it's trivially easy to create memories of early childhood experience - although again, she never researched implanting memories of abuse. Yet she gives expert testimony saying that it is common. Replication of her work has shown that while yes, some people can have relatively minor memories implanted, like getting lost at a mall, it is much harder or impossible to implant a less plausible memory, such as getting an enema. If you want to learn more about all this from a different perspective than the one you have now, I recommend this article: https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controv...