Top 12 Quotes & Sayings by Elizabeth Loftus

When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction.

In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened.

If we make people believe that before the age of 16 they got sick drinking vodka, they don't want to drink as much vodka.

Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.

When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. The process of calling it into conscious awareness can change it, and now you're storing something that's different. We all do this, for example, by inadvertently adopting a story we've heard.

To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything.

Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one.

Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, .. False memories have these characteristics too.

We all have memories that are malleable and susceptible to being contaminated or supplemented in some way.

My work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don't have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory.

You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.

We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories.