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Talk:Elizabeth Loftus
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57 is the magic number[edit]
Not 58th or 56th most influential psychologist, but 57th? MasterDebater (talk) 01:44, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
Loftus requires more scrutiny than she gets[edit]
Loftus generally gets a free pass in places like this due to her devotion to atheism and skepticism. I'm into those things, too, but I am not into her very poorly conducted experiments in which the only thing she demonstrates is that peer and family pressure is very powerful. She takes a family, singles out one member to be the subject, then she tells the rest of the family to ask the subject to 'remember' a fictional incident in which the subject got in a fight with a schoolmate that was so nasty the police had to be called. The subject steadfastly resists agreeing that this ever happened, but the family continue cajoling the subject until the subject finally decides to 'go along to get along', that is, the subject agrees that the incident took place not because the family has 'implanted' a false memory, but because the family won't take NO for an answer. Trust is also exploited. Every one of her false memory 'experiments' utilizes the same social pressure technique. It is crazy that anyone takes her seriously. Granted, she has suffered more abuse over invalid criticism than she deserves, but the reason she puts up with it isn't because she's on some quest for the truth, it's because she charges $600/hr to testify at legal trials. Since there is no way of knowing when she'll be called as a witness, that means she has to, on average, get paid for several entire days, coming away with well over $10,000 for a five or ten minute testimony (8hrs per day x $600 = $4800 x 3 days = $14,400) — Unsigned, by: 108.180.92.37 / talk
- Sounds bad indeed. Now all we'd need is some source for the trial thing. And I agree with you: It's unethical, and it's too easy to make naive people believe the words of people they so far had good reasons to trust. Even in case the way she's doing it should be less extreme than how you described it. PS: No April Fool intended.--Max Sinister (talk) 22:38, 1 April 2023 (UTC)