Talk:Lost in the mall technique

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Initial comments

Can someone rewrite this with more information about the technique and less information about why it is bad? I would laugh if it wasn't a serious matter. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.228.218 (talk) 16:46, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Please directly cite the studies you are referring to. I have not heard of any study besides the lost ib the mall study.

If I recall correctly, the other studies are listed in Loftus' speech-- here. --Alecmconroy 19:59, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

As I read this, it says "nearly 25%" of the very small group tested said blah blah blah. Later on, it would appear to say that only five people were tested. So "nearly 25%" = 1 = 20% = statistically insignificant? Or am I reading this wrong? Ethan Mitchell 18:33, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

You might be looking at a different version than I am, but it states that those 5 were only a pilot study to obtain funding for a larger study.--128.154.44.44 16:35, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I get it. But...does the last paragraph actually contribute anything to this article? If the point is that the study had to get HSR clearance, then let's focus on that. But still, practically everything does. I don't see why it is newsworthy that the study began with a pilot study. Ethan Mitchell 20:44, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

My edit got accidently sent before I had chance to finish my edit summary. What I meant to say was, that 'formerly' implies that the study is no longer known as the 'lost in the mall technique'. I assume that what was meant was 'formally', which means 'officially'. -UK-Logician-2006 01:27, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Critique

I think the criticism is undue weight for the following reasons:

• Who is Crook? Any training, credentials, achievements-- just a person with a wordprocessor and some time?
• The cited paper, although in a journal, seems to be pretty clearly an opinion piece, not a "peer-reviewed scientific paper" per se.
• The principle objection is primarily ethical/political/social, not cognitive. Lost in the Mall itself has wide scientific consensus, has been replicated, and is taught in practically every good cognition text you will find. It's sufficiently accepted that every psychology dept in the world covers it as some point in their curriculum.
• The controversy, in my opinion, is not so much about the Lost in the Mall technique itself-- that's firmly established. The critique is about False Memory Syndrome-- the idea that people can remember things that never happened to them, and how a society should balance the need to protect victims of sexual abuse with the needs to protect the rights of those wrongly accused. There isn't any serious debate over whether Lost in the Mall works-- the debate is sort of over the relative frequencies of False Memory Syndrome -vs- Recovered Memories.

Therefore, I'll again remove the extensive critique and warn Abuse Truth not to reinsert it without first generating a consensus for its inclusion. I'll also add a one sentence "See also False Memory Syndrome for a more extensive discussion."

Lastly, I will note that the controversy section of False Memory Syndrome does seem a little light, and I'd suggest efforts to balance the Repressed -vs- False memory debate be focused there, where a legitimate debate does exist, rather than on this specific technique, which has the near-total consensus of cognitive psychology. --Alecmconroy (talk) 10:21, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

The important things is that Loftus' study has been critiqued in a peer reviewed scientific journal. It deserves mention in wikipedia as a critique. Crook's objection is not only "ethical/political/social."

From Crook's two journal articles: "An analysis of the mall study shows that beyond the external misrepresentations, internal scientific methodological errors cast doubt on the validity of the claims that have been attributed to the mall study within scholarly and legal arenas. The minimal involvement—or, in some cases, negative impact—of collegial consultation, academic supervision, and peer review throughout the evolution of the mall study are reviewed."

"We have demonstrated that the ethics, methods, data, and assumptions in the mall study have not been subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny, and yet, the purported results of the mall study have been entered into sworn testimony and reported by the media to support a claim that therapists can implant false memories of childhood trauma. Although we acknowledge that inaccurate and mistaken memories may occur, we must conclude that Loftus and Pickrell's mall study does not support in any manner the notion that false autobiographical memories of abuse in childhood can be implanted by therapists."

These quotes show that Crook's work attacks the methodological deficiencies, lack of peer review and misrepresentations of the data in Loftus' work. You state that Loftus' study has "wide scientific consensus" and is taught in most cognition texts. Do you have a source to back this up? There are many that strongly disagree with Loftus' work and she has been heavily critiqued in the field. Your opinion is apparently biased in favor of the technique. However, this bias should not be allowed to create censorship of alternative opinions on wikipedia pages. I will be adding citation tags to the article, until the obvious problem of article bias is fixed.Abuse truth (talk) 05:33, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

More replies to the ideas from the Lost in the Mall Study:

Planting False Childhood Memories in Children: The Role of Event Plausibility

Kathy Pezdek, Danelle Hodge Child Development, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1999), pp. 887-895

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-3920%28199907%2F08%2970%3A4%3C887%3APFCMIC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage

This experiment tested and supported the hypothesis that events will be suggestively planted in children's memory to the degree that the suggested event is plausible and script-relevant knowledge exists in memory. Nineteen 5- to 7-year-old children and 20 9- to 12-year-old children were read descriptions of two true events and two false events, reported to have occurred when they were 4 years old. One false event described the child lost in a mall while shopping (the plausible false event); the other false event described the child receiving a rectal enema (the implausible false event). The majority of the 39 children (54%) did not remember either false event. However, whereas 14 children recalled the plausible but not the implausible false event, only one child recalled the implausible but not the plausible false event; this difference was statistically significant. Three additional children (all in the younger age group) recalled both false events. Although this pattern of results was consistent for both age groups, the differences were significant for the younger children only. A framework is outlined specifying the cognitive processes underlying suggestively planting false events in memory.Abuse truth (talk) 04:53, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Another critique of the Lost in the Mall Study

title Memory, Abuse, and Science: Questioning Claims About the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic journal American Psychologist Volume 51 http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=HvMJ8y7hTLwzJKhQcXtBzn5T7hD51pStTy7SkQkzTNz51hB3Shgg!1063769811?docId=96531378 http://kspope.com/memory/memory.php

Among the kinds of questions that might be useful in evaluating claims about implanting "a complete memory with details and relevant emotions for a traumatic event that didn't happen" based on this research are the following:

Does the trauma specified in the lost-in-the-mall experiment seem comparable to the trauma forming the basis of false memory syndrome? Loftus (1993) described the implanted traumatic event in the shopping-mall experiment as follows: "Chris was convinced by his older brother Jim, that he had been lost in a shopping mall when he was five years old" (p. 532). Does this seem, for example, a reasonable analogy for a five-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her father? Pezdek (1995; see also Pezdek, Finger, & Hodge, 1996) has suggested that this may not be the case. In attempting to arrive at a more analogous situation-that of a suggested false memory of a rectal enema-her experimental attempts at implantation of a suggestion had a 0% success rate.

What is the impact of the potentially confounding variables in claiming the shopping-mall experiment to be a convincing analogue of therapy (Loftus, 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994)? Is it possible that the findings are an artifact of this particular design, for example, that the older family member claims to have been present when the event occurred and to have witnessed it, a claim the therapist can never make? To date, replications and extensions of this study have tended to use a similar methodology; that is, either the older family member makes the suggestions in his or her role as the experimenter's confederate, or the experimenter presents the suggestion as being the report of an older family member, thus creating a surrogate confederate.

Has this line of research assumed that verbal reports provided to researchers are the equivalent of actual memories? Spanos (1994) suggested that changes in report in suggestibility research may represent compliance with social demand conditions of the research design rather than actual changes in what is recalled. In what ways were the measures to demonstrate actual changes or creations of memory representations validated and confounding variables (e.g., demand characteristics) excluded? Given that being lost while out shopping is apparently a common childhood experience, how is the determination made that the lost-in-the-mall memory is not substantially correct? What supports the claim that "Chris had remembered a traumatic episode that never occurred" (Garry & Loftus, 1994, p. 83). That is, is there any possibility that Chris's family had forgotten an actual event of this type?

If the experiment is assumed for heuristic reasons to demonstrate that an older family member can extensively rewrite a younger relative's memory in regard to a trauma at which the older relative was present, why have false memory syndrome proponents presented this research as applying to the dynamics of therapy (e.g., Loftus, 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994) but not to the dynamics of families, particularly those in which parents or other relatives may be exerting pressure on an adult to retract reports of delayed recall? Is it possible that older family members can rewrite younger relatives' memories in regard to traumatic events at which they were present? Might this occur in the context of sexual abuse when the repeated suggestion is made by a perpetrator that "nothing happened" and that any subsequent awareness of the abuse constitutes a false memory?Abuse truth (talk) 03:17, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

As per the data above, I have re-added a new critique section to the page, as per Wikpedia's NPOV policy. I have additional sources, showing that five different articles have critiqued the study or Loftus' work. Abuse truth (talk) 03:27, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

I have removed the tags I initially added to the article as it appears that the problems have been fixed and debate has been closed. ResearchEditor (talk) 15:08, 21 March 2008 (UTC) (formerly AT)

Removed criticisms

I removed the "joe random web pages" criticisms. Since this is a scientific experiment, published in peer-reviewed journals, the criticisms should adhere to a similarly high level of reliability. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:^simple/_complex 14:55, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Context on Crook's criticisms:

• [1]
• Loftus EF, 1999, Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings. Ethics & Behaviour, 9(1), 51-60.
• [2] WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:^simple/_complex 17:01, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there's a lot more support for lost in the mall than there is criticism, and wonder if the extensive criticisms section, without a comparable section on how respected and replicated the approach is, is perhaps undue weight. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:^simple/_complex 17:11, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

More criticism, recently added, which should be removed (and shouldn't have been re-added without reasons given):

Crook and Dean 2 is used support criticism of Loftus, not just of her work, so needs to be an expert in that field, not just Loftus's field.

The discrepancy between Loftus's summaries of the work may be relevant and appropriate, but it might be a WP:SYNTHESIS violation unless a reliable source comments on the discrepancy.

Loftus's testimony is a primary source, and doesn't appear relevant to the topic.

— Arthur Rubin (talk) 07:55, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

The whole paragraphs seem to be irrelevant and added as a sly critique of Loftus ("look! She's an unethical monster! She made false memories! And she can't remember about demand characteristics more than a decade later!") and even if it weren't sly-critical and subtly disparaging, it still dangles without context or a reasonable integration with the rest of the page. She planted false memories in subjects, that was the point of the test. She doesn't remember the details of an experiment that was the first in a series and have since been replicated and extended. So what? So nothing, removed. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:^simple/_complex 15:06, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Memory implantation page

I have extended the methodology section to include a bit more details on the technique in itself, considering this page is called "lost in the mall technique" i found that appropriate. I also tidied up a bit in the "criticisms" section, there was still a bit of biased language used. I am in the process of creating an article called "memory implantation" so as soon as that is finished I will add links to it on this page. Further discussions of the conclusions and implications of the lost in the mall technique are better suited, in my opinion, for an article covering lost in the mall as well as other memory implantation techniques and studies.Lieselm (talk) 11:12, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the criticism section should be removed entirely. It is bloated, deceptive and seems to be geared to name-drop and cast doubt. It links Loftus study to controversial subjects for no good reason. It adds and overemphazises irrelevant information. It's mere existence pretends that Loftus study is a heavily critized Study. It is not. All studies get somewhat criticized, but usually by other scientist. And unless that critique substantially changes the findings, it usually doesn't show up on the Wikipedia page. Here you mostly have therapist that did not like that the study was somewhat disillusioning to them and their patients.

There is a lot of money and power in generating and managing false memories. It's mostly done unintentional, but false memory is a way to exploit vulnerable people in endless therapy. It can even be used to plot people against each other. Some don't want the knowledge about false memory to be spread because it would ruin their market and their means to control people. If everybody was more aware of how easy it is to distort memories, doing so would be much harder. Knowledge about false memory can protect people from abuse. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:A61:12FF:B801:D49F:5045:7778:A8EC (talk) 13:02, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes. That is how it is. --Hob Gadling (talk) 13:38, 29 January 2023 (UTC)