UCI Professor Wins Big Award

Elizabeth Loftus has shown memory to be malleable, thus casting doubt on sensitive cases.

UC Irvine psychologist and memory expert Elizabeth Loftus will receive $200,000 as winner of the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, the schools announced Tuesday.

Loftus’ work has shown that memory is not like a recorder that can replay exactly what happened, but is susceptible to suggestion and manipulation. Her research has cast doubt on the validity of repressed memories that surface years later.

The Grawemeyer website said Loftus’ research “has implications for law and for psychotherapy’s methods of probing memory.”

Loftus, 60, called the award “a validation of work that I have been passionate about but also had to do in a climate of a fair amount of hostility and difficulty. So there’s a special sense of vindication and appreciation that the enemies who have been trying to do me in for at least 10 years did not succeed.”

The psychologist said she would use some of the money to support her research.

Loftus, ranked 58th by the Review of General Psychology on its list of the 100 top psychologists of the 20th century, has testified as an expert witness or worked as a consultant on a number of high-profile trials, including the McMartin preschool molestation and Hillside Strangler cases, the Rodney King beating and the Bosnian War trials.

She came to UCI as a distinguished professor of psychology and criminology in 2002.

Industrialist H. Charles Grawemeyer endowed a series of awards in 1984. In addition to psychology, they are given for education, improving world order, music composition and religion. Previous winners include former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman.

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