Elizabeth Loftus
Memory remembers, but also invents.
A memory researcher who showed how easily our recollections can be reshaped by suggestion.
techniques
Memory is not a recording. It is reconstructed each time we remember.
Who they were
Elizabeth Loftus spent her career probing a quiet unease: that the past we feel so sure of may not be the past that happened. Through careful experiments she revealed the misinformation effect, showing how a leading question or a stray detail can fold itself into a memory until it feels entirely real. Her findings transformed how courts weigh eyewitness testimony and how psychology understands the fragility of recall. By taking memory seriously as something we reconstruct rather than replay, she changed both science and the law.
Famous books
What they left on the shelf
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their techniques
How the work was done
Their big idea
Misinformation Effect
Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated that memory is far more suggestible than it feels. Information encountered after an event, even a single misleading word, can slip into recollection and reshape what a witness sincerely believes they saw.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Loftus — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.