More Baloney about Implanting False Memories

TV show available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/memory-hackers.html

In an otherwise excellent episode of Nova on PBS about recent research into memory - available for viewing in its entirety at the website above - the show takes what is for me a disturbing turn around the 38 minute mark. It starts to discuss the issue of whether false memories can be implanted in people. An academic psychologist named Julia Shaw discussed her experiments which she believes "proved" that you can induce in someone a memory of a crime in the distant past that they did not actually commit.

Dr. Julia Shaw

According to an article in the New Yorker, Shaw modeled her work after that of child abuse apologist and memory pseudo-expert Elizabeth Lofton. Shaw claimed that she was able to induce this kind of false memory in 70% of her subjects. Of course, even if this were true, it means that she was unable to supposedly accomplish this feat in almost one third of her subjects, which leaves us with the question of what distinguishes that portion of the sample from the others.

But leaving that aside, let's look at the experiment she did, as shown with a film of one probably illustrative subject during the experiment. The experimenter brought up a supposed incident that occurred when the subject was 12 years old. Dr. Shaw told the subject that the subject's parents had told her about the false incident. She said, "What happened was you initiated a fight that was so severe that the police called your parents. They said it happened in the fall when you were with Ryan when it happened." She mentioned two facts that were in fact true - a move the family had made around that time, and the name of someone she knew.

The subject's first response was not surprising, and it was quite definitive - if not emphatic. As I relate the dialog in the experiment, I want readers to notice that the subject moves from a quick and clear-cut response at first, denying this happened, to later describing an event that she starts to think may possibly have happened. In the later interview, not only is her language tentative, but she looks puzzled and is intermittently shaking her head no! If you don't believe me, watch the show segment for yourself by clicking on the link under the picture at the top of the post.

The key point the reader should also consider is that the experimenter has now put the subject in the position of calling her parents liars! If they are generally truthful, hearing that they reported something that seems completely alien to her whole personality will at the very least introduce cognitive dissonance and self doubt. I mean, why would her parents make up something like that? This self doubt is clearly manifested in the patient's facial expressions and tone of voice as she says the things she says in the film. 

However, even if the parents were notorious for being fast and loose with the truth or made a habit of blaming the subject for things that were not her fault (a not uncommon feature in dysfunctional families), due to family loyalty the patient might still become motivated to protect her parents' reputation to the experimenter and perhaps also to save herself from an argument with the parents later on. Family loyalty is something Dr. Shaw apparently either knows nothing about and/or has never even considered.

The subject's initial response to the experimenter relating to her what her parents allegedly said had "happened" was this:  "Honestly, I don't remember. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't think I've ever been in a fight." (She laughs). I'm so confused!" While she said this, I observed not the least bit of hesitation.

Dr. Shaw admits during the program that she uses techniques meant to create social pressure to get the subject to come up with the false "memory." Experiments in social psychology have shown that the pressure to conform to a group can cause people to say things that they actually know are not true. In other words, they blatantly lie in order to fit in. The most famous of these experiments were done by Soloman Asch, as described here.

Shaw tells the subject, "Relax, close your eyes, and focus on trying to retrieve this." This instruction implicitly assumes that the event the experimenter concocted actually took place. Then comes a little extra social pressure: "It seems strange, but it does work for most people." She then has the patient picture herself at the time and place under discussion. "Picture yourself at the age of 14 and it's Fall and you were with Ryan when it happened."

A week later, the subject starts talking tentatively, "I remember like a verbal fight." She has an unmistakable puzzled look on her face. "It seems so unlikely." Clearly, she is not really recalling any specific event, but trying to put together bits and pieces in her memory from other things that might have happened to her - again, I strongly suspect, to avoid either saying or believing that her parents have lied about her. 

She continues, "Maybe I pushed or something."

Shaw encourages her to continue. "Good! Ok!"

Subject: "I feel like she pushed [significant pause] me first. 

Feeling like something might be true is hardly the same as actually remembering it.

A week later, the subject embellishes the non-story: "I think the cops showed up." (Translation: I'm not really sure about this). "We were kind of having maybe like a verbal kind of fight and it got into a push." Maybe? Again, does not sound like a specific memory at all. And the coup-de-grace: After saying this, she again shakes her head no.

Dr. Shaw confidently asserts that she has now proven that you can induce false memories in people, when what she actually proved was that under conditions of social pressure, cognitive dissonance, and/or family loyalty issues (and probably in several other contexts), you can induce people to make stuff up. And sometimes even lie to themselves about it.

Why Don't They Tell?

One of the things that child abuse deniers like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation focus on, besides Elizabeth Loftus's irrelevant arguments about the unreliability of memory, is the fact that many adults who claim to have been victims of incest as children did not tell any other adults about it at the time the alleged incidents took place. 

John and Mackenzie Phillips

Some children do tell.  So why wouldn't the others?

A whole bunch of logical explanations have been advanced to explain why not. In an article in the December 2010 issue of Psychiatric Times, Richard Kluft lists several of them:  incomprehension, shame, fear of retaliation, and the misperception that the child is to blame.  He also mentions loyalty conflicts, but more on that in a little bit.

The statistics listed in this article, as unreliable as they may be, say that only 30% of incest victims reveal their situations, and most of the revealers are the older children and adolescents.  In almost half of these, the revelation is accidental.  Some who do reveal suffer negative consequences, such as being blamed for "seducing" the perpetrator or being accused of lying. One study showed that 52% of those who reported mistreatment to a parent were still being abused a year after the disclosure.

Many perpetrators do threaten the victim that if he or she tells, they might kill someone in the family.  Sometimes they say that the authorities will come in and break up the family - not an unlikely scenario if the child is believed and the parent who is told actually reports the perpetrator.  Other victims are told that no one will believe them.

All good explanations for why the children remain silent.  However, I think that the reason that is talked about the least may be the most important of all:  family loyalty.  Family loyalty as a major determinant of human behavior was focussed on in psychotherapy most notably by family systems pioneer Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy.  It is also highly consistent with the biological evolutionary concept of kin selection.

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy



The strength of family loyalty was illustrated by a patient I saw who had been raised by a female relative rather than by her mother because the mother was a deadbeat parent.  In an initial interview, the patient impulsively blurted out, for the very first time in her life, that the husband of this female relative had continuously molested her.  She immediately burst into tears and could not stop crying for many minutes.

One might assume that memories of the abuse had come flooding back to her and that this was the reason for the emotional breakdown, but as it turned out, that was not it at all.  The woman kept repeating, "I can't believe I told someone!  I can't believe I told someone!"  

After I calmed her down by swearing by all that was dear to me that the session was confidential and no one outside the room would ever have to know what she had revealed, she admitted that her biggest fear was that the woman who raised her would be irreparably hurt by the revelation that her husband had done what he had done.  The patient could not bare the thought that this was what might happen.  She owed the woman just too much.

As Boszormenyi-Nagy stated in his 1986 book, Between Give and Take: A Clinical Guide to Contextual Therapy, "Even very small children are sensitive barometers; they know when their parents are overburdened with anxiety, guilt and mistrust.  Moreover, they want to do something about it." (p.35).  If important relatives are dependent in some way on the perpetrator, children are naturally reluctant to create problems for those relationships.

Many victims of incest dissociate, or zone out, when memories of the abuse surface.  Most therapists assume that this takes place because the incest survivor is trying to avoid the pain associated with the memory.  Undoubtedly this has something to do with it.  However, I find that a much more important consideration with my patients is that they are following a family rule, and do not want to break it out of family loyalty.

When the abuse happened, they were told by the perpetrator in so many words, "This never happened."  When the survivor starts to think about the fact that the incest did indeed happen, they dissociate so that the memories begin to either take on an unreal quality or seem to disappear altogether.   Dissociating may be a way of preventing the sort of accidental revelation to others that took place as described with my patient above.