Page 171 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 153

man tried to help you? When we discovered you, you were holding
the old man’s hand and were crying.” Within a few days of hearing
such a story, most people will have incorporated that planted mem-
ory into their own history, will have embroidered it with details
(“Oh, yeah, the old man who helped me was wearing a flannel
shirt.”), and will be absolutely certain that it really happened—when,
in fact, it didn’t. This has been called the false memory syndrome.

The Recovered Memory Phenomenon Loftus’s research on
the planting of false childhood memories has led her and many other
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cognitive scientists to take a close and skeptical look at a recent so-
cietal phenomenon: the recovered memory phenomenon. During
the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of adults seemed to remember hor-
rifying childhood events that had been previously unavailable to
them. Many of these memories involved sexual abuse, over a period
of months or years, by their father or some other family member.
Some memories even included (as part of the abuse) vivid accounts
of forced participation in elaborate satanic rituals involving such
bizarre and gruesome activities as the killing and devouring of in-
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fants. Typically, these memories would surface during intensive
psychotherapy—frequently under hypnosis—or after reading a vivid
and highly suggestive self-help book.
Needless to say, sexual abuse does occur within families—and
the consequences of such abuse can be tragic. Accordingly, all such
revelations should be taken seriously. At the same time, most cogni-
tive scientists who have made a systematic study of human memory
are convinced that the majority of these reported memories do not
reflect reality.They argue that just as police and lawyers can help wit-
nesses “remember” incidents that never happened, many people can
be led to “remember” such terrible things as childhood sexual abuse
that never occurred.
According to the scientists who have done systematic research on
the nature of memory, repeated instances of traumatic events occur-
ring over a long stretch of time are not usually forgotten; the scientists
assert that, while this kind of thing might happen on rare occasions, it
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simply is not the way memory works. Rather, they suggest that, in a
manner parallel to the Loftus experiments, memories of abuse could
have been unintentionally planted by the therapists themselves—not
with any malevolent motive, of course, but in a sincere attempt to help