SUCCESS STORY
Elizabeth Loftus and her 10,000 hours
By Grace Callen | Psychology major
It’s 1966 at Stanford University during a mathematical psychology lecture, and towards the back of the classroom is Elizabeth Loftus who can be seen hemming her skirt or writing letters to family. She was one of the very few women to be a graduate student in mathematical psychology at the time, but began to find herself disinterested in mathematical theories. After an informal pole she was deemed least likely to succeed in psychology by her classmates. Unlike their predictions though, she did great things in psychology and went on to be one of the most influential psychologists in history (Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology, 331). Loftus has dedicated her life to psychology by getting a doctorate, by spending hours in memory research, and by teaching others. Her success has helped break stereotypes for women and has inspired them to reach higher levels as psychologists. Her research has also been very influential in learning about repressed memory. While teaching at university of Washington, Seattle, Loftus began to be interested in eyewitness testimony. She also did studies involving the impairment of memory and rich false memories. Elizabeth Loftus achieved success in psychology by putting in her 10,000 hours through education, teaching, and her research on memory.
Elizabeth Loftus spent many years educating herself in psychology. She originally became a math major, but after taking Intro. To Psychology as an elective she decided to become a double major in math and psychology. After finishing her undergraduate degrees at University of California, Los Angeles, she moved on to graduate school at Stanford University. There she discovered that she was not quite as interested in mathematical psychology as she thought she was. She did however gain an interest in memory and began collaboration with Jonathan Freedman on semantic memory which she continued after graduate school (Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology, 331).
Elizabeth Loftus spent many years teaching at the University of Washington, Seattle, about three decades to be specific. There she discovered her interest in eyewitness testimony, and decided to test it. In 2002 however, she decided to accept a distinguished professorship from the University of California, Irvine. While there she started new avenues of research exploring the repercussions of developing false memories (Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology, 332). When Elizabeth Loftus was forty-four she discovered that even she could experience false memories. Her uncle told her at a family gathering that she had been the one who discovered her mother dead. After that, “memories” started flooding back about the incident. Her uncle had made a mistake however, and informed her a couple days later that it was actually her aunt who had discovered her mother’s body, showing her that she too could apply to her own research (Neimark, 1996).
One of the experiments Loftus conducted was one where she would show experimental witnesses films of accidents and after ask one group how fast the cars were going when they “hit” each other and ask the other group how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” into each other. The group that received the word “smashed” tended to estimate the speed higher than the group that received the word “hit,” and those that received the word “smashed” were more likely to report broken glass when there wasn’t any (American Psychologist, 2003). Although she loved the research, Loftus wanted to be up close and personal, so she decided to volunteer for a public defender in a murder case. This allowed her to watch various phases of the case involving witness testimony. When the case finished, Loftus wrote about it in an article for Psychology Today magazine. “After that, her life would never be the same. The circulation of the magazine was near a million and was read by many lawyers and judges” (American Psychologist, 2003). She was able to gain a lot more experience applying psychology to legal cases because lawyers who had read her article started calling her up and asking her to help assist them on their cases.
The research Elizabeth Loftus is most famous for is her research into repressed memory. People have often believed in the past that traumatic memories from childhood can be repressed and years later dredged up from their subconscious. Elizabeth Loftus was skeptical of this theory, and decided to test the theory through research. She conducted a study to see whether or not it was possible to plant false memories in people. She tried planting childhood memories of participants getting lost in the mall, facing a threat to their life, and even witnessing demonic possession. Surprisingly, the experiment was successful and she was able to plant all of these memories into various participants. She also did another experiment where she would plant memories of a bad experience with food, and found that those people would report a lower desire to eat them (Zagorski, 2005). Loftus would later share about this experiment in a ted talk saying “when you feed people misinformation about some experience they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory” (Loftus, 2013). This is important because it means that therapists who are supposedly helping their patients recover memories, could actually be mistakenly planting false memories in them instead. Elizabeth Loftus found this alarming because it meant that a lot of innocent people could end up in jail for things that they did not do.
Although eyewitness testimony is not always that reliable, it is usually very convincing for a jury. Elizabeth Loftus warned her audience during the ted talk that “just because somebody tells you something and they say it with confidence, just because they say it with lots of detail, just because they express emotion when they say it, it doesn’t mean that it really happened” (Loftus, 2013). Her research into repressed memory soon gained a lot of attention and she was given opportunities to help government agencies in understanding human memory that included the FBI, the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Justice.
Because her research was so influential, Elizabeth Loftus received four honorary doctorates that included one from Miami University, Leiden University in the Netherlands, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and the University of Portsmouth in England. She has also received many awards including the Distinguished Contributions to Forensic Psychology award and the Distinguished Contribution to Basic and Applied Scientific Psychology award from the American Association of applied and preventative Psychology (American Psychologist, 2003).
Elizabeth Loftus’s research was pretty controversial though, and was not welcomed by all. She definitely received her fair share of criticism. She participated in many intellectual debates, and debated through journals with some very accomplished memory scientists (Zagorski, 2005). This continued for many years, but the toughest opposition she would face would be from the general population that believed they had really recovered repressed memories. Elizabeth Loftus remembers receiving death threats from people and for a while had to have a bodyguard when she went out (Loftus, 2013). Although her research was controversial it still made a big impact, and has changed not only this country’s view of memory, but the world’s as well.
It is clear that Elizabeth Loftus has spent the majority of her life in Psychology. She applies to the theory that Malcolm Gladwell refers to as the 10,000 hour theory in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. The 10,000 hour theory is a theory that after having 10,000 hours of practice at something, you can become an expert at that. The 10,000 hour theory could explain why people like Bill Joy and the Beatles became successful too. Bill Joy learned about computer programming in the 1970’s, when computers were the size of rooms. He attended school in Michigan, which was one of the first Universities to get a computer that used time-sharing or the ability to have more than one person using the computer at a time. This allowed him to spend much of his free time programming. “At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or ten hours a day,” Bill Joy remembered (Gladwell, 46). He wanted to be an expert, and he achieved this by practicing 10,000 hours. The Beatles gained success in a similar way. They had been performing for about ten years before they became popular. Before they came to the United States, the Beatles spent much of their time in Hamburg playing for very little money, but they had a lot of practice. They performed at various places for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. At the time of their first big success in 1964, the Beatles “had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times” (Gladwell, 50). This is remarkable and makes sense of why the Beatles were so successful. It can also explain why Elizabeth Loftus was so successful. Elizabeth Loftus spent years getting an education in psychology, and also had a lot of hands on training with her research. If it were not for these things, Elizabeth Loftus could never have become the psychologist that she did.
In 2002 Elizabeth Loftus was recognized in the Review of General Psychology report as the 58th out of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, and of the list she was the top ranked woman. “She sometimes wonders how long it will take for a woman to achieve one of those very top spots” (American Psychologist, 2005). She hopes it will happen soon after the election of the first female president of the United States. Why has Elizabeth Loftus been so successful? That can be answered in two words, “hard work”. Elizabeth Loftus has put well over 10,000 hours into her work in psychology. She has spent more than thirty years of her life studying and teaching others about the fallibility of memory. Without her, there would still be many unknown things about human memory including the “misinformation effect”. Like Bill Joy and the Beatles, Elizabeth Loftus spent much of her time practicing psychology through studying it in her undergraduate and graduate classes, testing her theories through research, and through her devotion in teaching others about psychology and how it applies to our everyday lives. She also spent a lot of time assisting lawyers and organizations like the FBI as an expert witness. Through her practice and hard work, Elizabeth Loftus has helped shape psychology into what it is today and has become a world renown memory and forensic psychologist and researcher.
Work Cited
American Psychologist, AP. (2013).Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of psychology. American Psychologist, 68(5), 331–333.
Elizabeth Loftus: Award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of Psychology. (2003). US: American Psychologist.
Gladwell, M.G. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.
Loftus, E. TEDGLOBAL. (2013, June). How reliable is your memory? [Video File]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabethloftusthefictionofmemory
Neimark J. (January, 1996). The diva of disclosure, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus.
Psychology Today. Retrieved from http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/psytoday.htm
Zagorski, N. (2005). Profile of Elizabeth F. Loftus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(39), 13721–13723. doi:10.1073/pnas.0506223102
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grace Callen, psychology major from Minneapolis, seeks to become a forensic psychologist. Callen likes dancing, swimming, and reading mystery novels.
What I’ve Learned
Great stories start with a question. You want the reader to keep reading, so you create suspense.
Great writers finish where they start. You start with an idea, and end with that same idea.
Drop readers into a moment. Telling the reader an anecdote or a short story that’s related to your topic can make it more fun and interesting.
Be patient. Yes, giving yourself more time than just the night before can really help you do better when writing a paper. Spending a week on an assignment instead of just a day, produces a very different assignment.
No one becomes an expert at something overnight. It takes years of practice to become truly talented. According to Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours should help you achieve success. This theory applies to many people, including the very talented Elizabeth Loftus and the very popular British band from the 60s, the Beatles
Your cultural legacy matters. Rice farming is a big part of Asian agriculture and it is very tedious work. It is also very hard and complex, and requires you to have some skill. Growing up in a place where you need lots of patience can be very beneficial to you because, as you may have discovered during any math class you have ever had, math is something that often requires a lot of patience.
While sitting at my desk trying to quickly finish my paper in order to move on to the dozens of other assignments I had to do, like my psychology research project, I now understood why my college writing professor had us gather our sources ahead of time. Hunting sources down at 10:00 at night would have been a pain.
Being an introvert myself, I found it difficult to gather up enough nerve to share what I had written in college writing. But once you share, you realize that things tend to be a lot scarier in your head than they are in reality.
Appealing to the senses can help readers visualize things better. Tell them what they would see, hear, smell, feel, and maybe even taste. If you do all that, you probably have a good piece of writing.
Sometimes it is hard to put your thoughts into words when you have to. I can write all kinds of things, and have great ideas, but when it comes down to writing for an important assignment, I sometimes forget that I’m smart.
Making a cover letter doesn’t have to be traditional and boring. If you drop your potential employers into a moment, they will probably enjoy your cover letter more and be more willing to hire you.
Having a rough outline to get you going on a paper can be very helpful, especially for those of us that can not work with chaos.
People like Bill Gates and Bill Joy are not just successful because they’re smart, although that helps. Having insanely lucky breaks and opportunities can make being successful a much easier task. Bill Gates came from a wealthy family and Bill Joy just happened to be at one of the only schools that had a computer in the 1970s. Malcolm Gladwell’s mom could apply to this too because she was able to go to school because of a nice Chinese man that paid for her to go.
Things that seem like disadvantages at the time can actually end up being advantages. Joe Flom grew up in the Great Depression which was a very difficult time. However, this led him to have a great education because there were less students which meant he had more time with teachers. There were also some really good teachers because doctors and other highly educated people could not get jobs in their fields at the time, so many became teachers. When he got to college, it was also really cheap because no one could afford to go.
While sitting in class, my stomach was grumbling, and I was very uninterested in what was happening and more interested in food since I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. My professor then introduced Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and started talking about how our ideas of success may not be right. I realized after reading the book that he was right. Success is not just about being that self-made man that American culture claims you can be, it’s about hard work, family background, cultural legacies, and those crazy opportunities that not everyone will get.
