Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall
Summary
This chapter talks about a psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus and her work related to memories. Specifically, Loftus claims that the mind distorts memories and can create real memories. Loftus believes the mind mixes fiction and facts. Slater describes a time when Loftus was trying to defend George Franklin who was being accused of raping and killing his daughter's best friend. Loftus tried to explain to the judge that Franklin's daughter accusation could not be counted as reliable since she was accusing him more than a decade after the supposedly "rape" occurred. Loftus lost her case and Franklin was sentenced. This trial was what sparked Loftus's experiments to try to prove her point.
Discussion
I thought the accusation of Franklin was absurd, and I did not think that you could bring up a "rape" more than 10 years after it happened. It is very interesting to know about Loftus's Lost in the Mall experience, because the majority of us do that at some point. We briefly remember a time in our lifes when we had a certain experience, we try to remember as much as possible and then we start adding details to our stories that we think happened but in reality we are exaggerating quite a bit.
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