Amanda Knox: Why Do Innocent Women Confess to Crimes They Didn’t Commit?

December 2016

 

Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior and Criminology, Law and Society

is quoted in Broadly for her research on false memories. She gives insight as to how innocent women fall victim to

confessing to crimes they are not guilty of.

 

From Broadly:

 

"Women go into therapy for depression and eating disorders," explains Elizabeth F. Loftus, a false memory expert

at the University of California, Irvine, "and come out of it thinking they were raped as a child." Loftus' research

advocates against repressed-memory therapy, where therapists seek to treat their patients' symptoms of psychosis by encouraging them to

"remember" repressed traumatic experiences, but in fact implant false memories, often of childhood sexual abuse. She tells me that in her laboratory

experiments, she's able to implant entirely false memories into "an average of 30 percent of normal, healthy people (of both genders.)"

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