Shaping Psychology: Perspectives on Legacy, Controversy and the Future of the Field

By Tomasz Witkowski

Shaping Psychology is a unique collection of in-depth conversations with a selection of the most influential psychologists working today, conducted at the end of a decade that shook psychological science. They provide insights into the controversies at the heart of contemporary psychology, revealing a clash of visions of what psychological science is all about and what its future holds. They are candid on the crisis in psychology and explore its causes, consequences and how to overcome it. They also discuss challenges in the field, their careers, and the experiences that shaped their worldview.

Those interviewed include pioneers who have shaped psychology as we know it today and who represent a wide range of specializations, from research to mental health practice, mainstream psychology to critical psychology and neuroscience to the Open Science movement. 

Elizabeth F. Loftus, StanfordUniversity, USA
Jerome Kagan, Harvard University, USA
Michael I. Posner, University of Oregon, USA
Scott O. Lilienfeld, Emory University, USA
Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, USA
Robert Plomin, King’s College London, UK 
Susan J. Blackmore, University of Plymouth, UK
Joseph E. LeDoux, New York University, USA
Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Roy F. Baumeister, University of Queensland, Australia
Erica Burman, University of Manchester, UK
Brian A. Nosek, University of Virginia, USA
Vikram H. Patel, Harvard Medical School, USA
Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, USA
Carol A. Tavris, independent academic,USA,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030500030

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

T. WitkowskiShaping Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50003-0_1

1. Introduction

Tomasz Witkowski¹  

(1)

Wroclaw, Poland

Tomasz Witkowski

Email: [e-mail]

Psychology is at present one of the most fashionable scholarly disciplines. In 2018, the American Psychological Association announced that psychology is more popular than it has ever been. It is estimated that between 1.2 and 1.6 million undergraduates take introductory psychology classes each year. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, overall employment for psychologists will grow by 19% between 2014 and 2024, much faster than the 7% average growth predicted for all occupations. Even the Catholic Church took notice of the field’s growing popularity, quite some time ago. In his 1987 report on the state of the church, the future pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger expressed concerns that psychology posed a real threat to religion, that it was responsible for empty monasteries and had superseded theology (Ratzinger and Messori 1987, pp. 99–100).

Indeed, the popularity and spread of psychology is tremendous. Most illustrated magazines have advice columns edited by a psychologist to address concerns from readers. Many people have scheduled appointments with their psychologists or psychotherapists and spend a few hours every week in their offices. TV programs often feature experts (psychologists) explaining why somebody had killed, raped, defrauded money or committed suicide. Psychologists always show up after some major event to provide an interpretation of what happened. In most bookstores, shelves bend under the weight of volumes offering psychological support and advice. Celebrities usually discuss their psychological problems publicly and openly talk about therapeutic programs that they participated in. People socializing at gatherings exchange recommendations for psychotherapists. Psychologists often show up at crash sites or the epicenters of natural disasters. They work at schools, hospitals, hospices, social support sites and in the human resource departments of most corporations. They can be found in the police and in the army, but also in churches and prisons. Psychology truly is omnipresent.

At the same time, it is replete with controversies, flaws, uncertain claims and even myths. In recent years, the field of psychology has been rocked by numerous scandals, such as the participation of psychologists in developing methods for enhancing the interrogation of prisoners, the demasking of a tremendous scientific fraud, and multiple failures in the replication of famous experiments, primarily in social psychology. These stories have made their way onto the front pages of newspapers, and information about them has traveled well beyond the borders of the academic community. Psychology and its weaknesses are the subject of conversations everywhere, with opinions being given regardless of education and knowledge. Many authors are talking and writing about the crisis in psychology. It is not uncommon to encounter the radical opinion that psychology in general is not a science. These opinions crowd out the voices of the authorities and scientists who built its foundations. Many lay readers, students, but also psychology teachers feel lost in the flood of opinions. Despite the growing popularity of psychology, it appears to be evolving into a minefield. From time to time, one of the mines explodes, leading to a precipitous drop of societal trust in the discipline.

How strong are the foundations of our science? Are we in fact in the midst of a crisis of psychology, as the sensational headlines declare? What are our field’s possibilities for the future?

While many have presented their views on the subject, credible voices answering that question are more difficult to find in the newspapers and on social media. One way to reach them is to collect the most eminent representatives of our field in one place and have them engage in a serious debate. While this is a task perhaps beyond the capacities of one individual, it is not impossible. In my view, a credible substitute for such a debate is a book containing conversations with masters of psychology. While it does not allow for a direct exchange of thoughts among them, I nevertheless believe that the careful reader, based on the words of some of our profession’s most distinguished representatives, will be able to discern both the common ground they share on some issues and the distinct differences among them. In addition, compared to a traditional debate, a book has the virtue of a lifespan longer than that of other, more ephemeral forms, and after a number of years can serve as a sort of intellectual bridge linking history with the present.

In undertaking the effort of carrying out such an endeavor, I was faced with complex dilemmas. Who should be considered an authority in our field? Should the selection of contributors be guided by rankings, and if so, which ones? How, taking into account the limitations of space inherent to a book, can the participation of practitioners of various subdisciplines be ensured? How to avoid the important voices that sometimes fail to break through the myriad of publications preferred by the academic system of Western civilization? That very same system that doubtlessly contributed to the fact that psychology is now said to be in crisis.

In attempting to resolve these dilemmas, I understood that I would not be able to compile a list of contributors that would please everybody. However, I did everything within my power to minimize potential biases, as well as to go beyond my personal preferences. I decided to use existing academic rankings so as to ensure the participation of the most outstanding scholars and thinkers in the process of painting a picture of contemporary psychology. To this end, I primarily employed two rankings published in the form of scientific articles (Haggbloom et al. 2002; Diener et al. 2014) and one from the internet (The Best Schools 2019). The authors of the former were also at pains to apply such criteria in their rankings that would ensure the particular place occupied by a given scientist would accurately reflect that individual’s contribution to psychology. The Internet ranking The 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists in the World was created based on the assumption that the influence of an individual can be evaluated by investigating the co-occurrence of the individual and the topic in web-accessible documents. In the creators’ opinion, if a person is influential with a particular topic then this person should be often mentioned in discussions of that topic. Their approach uses machine learning and search algorithms to characterize academic influence on the web, and thereby avoids the bias of continual human intervention that infects some academic rankings.

In preparing the list of contributors, I went to great lengths for the picture painted of contemporary psychology to also encompass its foundations located in history. The discoveries made by psychology that have withstood the test of time are responsible for its scientific strength, and a detailed review of them may assist us in understanding some contemporary weaknesses. This is why, when selecting my interlocutors, I placed significant stock in the 2002 ranking titled The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. I invited the most influential living psychologists practicing in the last century as well. This led to the inclusion of such participants as Jerome Kagan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Posner, Elizabeth Loftus, Robert Sternberg, Robert Plomin and Daniel Kahneman. The past and continuing importance of their accomplishments in forming contemporary psychology is also confirmed by the high position they enjoy in newer rankings.

Some of my interlocutors were too young to be included in the rankings of psychologists working mainly in the twentieth century, but their contribution to the development of academic psychology is so huge that they took prominent positions among the previously mentioned scientists in the academic ranking published in 2014 (Diener et al. 2014). These include neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and social psychologist Roy Baumeister.

Using the aforementioned academic rankings in the course of creating my list of interviewees, I was to a certain degree doomed to repeat the biases present in them. One bias in the rankings of eminence is that they rely on sources that give heavy weight to Americans, or at least to English speakers. Thus, the rankings, and consequently my list of contributors, do not fully cover the entire world and give too little credit to scientists outside the USA. This should be taken into account while reading this book. Another major concern is the infrequency of ethnic minorities in my list. Although general progress has been made in terms of human and civil rights for African Americans, Asians and Latino/Hispanics, these groups are extremely underrepresented in academic rankings.

The same applies to women. The very low percentage of women in academic rankings reflects the fact that they found it difficult to be accepted to graduate programs, were virtually excluded from having professorships in universities, and usually served as research associates or assistants. And while in recent years women have dominated such fields of study as psychology, and have made deep inroads into science, it is perhaps still too soon for these advances to be reflected in academic rankings which are almost the exclusive domain of people 50 years of age and up.

Bearing in mind the fact that contemporary psychology is more than just mainstream academic research in which social, cognitive and neuropsychologists dominate, my list of contributors includes those whose activity rarely assures them a prominent place in academic rankings (or has not yet done so), but without whom the picture of our science would be incomplete. These include Brian Nosek, a leading advocate of the open science movement, which is of exceptional importance in times when psychology is experiencing a replication crisis and ways of overcoming it are being sought. It is hard to imagine an honest presentation of the condition of contemporary psychology without the involvement of advocates of the open science movement.

My invitation for an interview was extended to Scott Lilienfeld not only because he is an outstanding clinical psychologist, but also due to the fact that he applies an evidence-based approach to this area and he is a representative of a rare approach to science that can be described as subtractive epistemology. The essence of this approach consists in cleansing both scholarship and practice of false constructs that find no confirmation in empirical evidence. Engaging in such thankless cleanup work makes it harder to appear in academic rankings than creating a new theory, even if it later turns out to be false. Despite that, Lilienfeld is a well-known and respected scientist and skeptic, which is why I felt his perspective in the discussion on the condition of contemporary psychology may prove invaluable.

The image of mental health psychology is complemented by the words of Vikram Patel—an internationally recognized authority in the field of global mental health. His perspective is also of immense value, because it takes into account the problems of the greater part of the world’s population, frequently quite different from what we focus on in our Western cultural milieu, particularly in North America. As a psychiatrist, he doesn’t appear in psychologists’ rankings, but his efforts have been recognized by his inclusion in the TIME 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2015.

An even rarer sight in academic rankings are representatives of such fields as parapsychology. For years, Susan Backmore was a leading and credible scholar in the field. Having abandoned it, she can regard it critically and with distance. She is also the creator of the exceptionally interesting concept of memetics, in which she attempts to combine the biological, psychological and cultural perspectives. I felt that this synthetic and interdisciplinary kind of thinking, so rare in contemporary psychology, is also deserving of attention. Blackmore was awarded 24th place by Best Masters in Psychology in the list of 30 Most Influential Psychologists Working Today (Tjentz 2013).

The voices of representatives of critical psychology—the harshest critics of mainstream psychology—are also of exceptional importance in completing our contemporary picture of the discipline. They are not to be found in academic rankings that reflect the state of a science done in a manner they systematically criticize. It would be nothing short of imprudent to ignore their voices. In science, unlike in democracy, the majority does not decide. Carefully, listening to the minority is an essential element of critical scientific thought. Erica Burnam is doubtlessly an exceptional member of this minority, who looks at psychology not only from the perspective of critical psychology, but also a feminist one, thus representing two complementary positions that are in opposition to the field’s mainstream.

The list of luminary psychologists invited to speak in this book finishes with Carol Tavris who, not herself an academic psychologist, was placed on the The 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists in the World (The Best Schools 2019) for her profound impact on psychology. Tavris is a self-declared skeptic and feminist whose invaluable insights as a freelancer has enriched the diversity of thought in our field.

Looking at the table of contents, it should be borne in mind that its final shape is a product not only of the intentions of its author. Some of the psychologists I invited refused for various reasons to participate in my project, while others simply did not respond. I was also limited by the size of the book. At a certain point, I was forced to close the list of interlocutors, and I am painfully aware of the gaps in it. It lacks the voice of the presently strong evolutionary psychology, representatives of religious psychology and supporters of qualitative research. There are also no representatives of computational psychology, so important in the era of research on artificial intelligence and many other specialties. In closing my work on this book, I felt unsatisfied not only because of the lack of representatives of some fields, but also because of the absence of advocates of different conceptual frameworks for the science of psychology such as descriptive or phenomenological psychology.

Excusing myself by the size of the book and the fact that some representatives of the fields absent here did not respond to my invitations, I also take full responsibility for any inaccuracies in the image of modern psychology that these deficiencies may lead to. If the book is positively received, perhaps I will be given a chance to make up for these shortcomings with another volume of conversations.

Taking into account the criteria and methods for selecting my interlocutors, it should be kept in mind that this book does not aspire to be a comprehensive, objective scientific interrogation and should under no circumstances be treated in this way. However, I am hopeful that, in this selection of voices with its inherent limits, readers will find multiple intriguing reflections, sources of inspiration and topics for discussion, and that as a whole it will help to develop a fuller picture of psychology than the fragmentary image portrayed in the media. In expressing these hopes, I also owe the reader a few sentences on the form of the book. I chose interviews because I believe that people have a need for direct contact with authorities. Only a select few enjoy the privilege of participating in lectures and seminars led by the interviewees collected in this volume. An even smaller number has the chance to speak with them and ask questions. Encountering all of them in one place, even at the most prestigious conference, is simply not possible. People generally come into contact with their scholarship and thought by way of books and articles, which, in line with publication requirements, are devoid of any personal reflections. This contact is even more frequently achieved through textbooks, which summarize and present only the results of their work. There are no reflections on the future of the field, no advice as to following one’s own career path, nor answers to the questions and issues raised in the media. The need for direct contact with authorities means that the most popular forms are those which can substitute for such contact, like TED Talks or interviews published on YouTube. Another form of contact that remains consistently popular are television, radio and print media interviews. Yet rarely do viewers, listeners and readers have the opportunity to experience interviews with exceptional individuals conducted by one person asking them similar questions. I hope that the present volume meets readers’ need for direct contact with the knowledge and perspectives of leading authorities in the field of psychology.

In conducting the interviews, I decided to allow my interviewees the greatest possible freedom to speak, attempting to direct the conversation towards subjects I find interesting rather than to probe or challenge them in a systematic way. This form of conversation is a product of my humility in the face of the knowledge and experience enjoyed by my interlocutors. I also do not think that one individual would be capable of a thorough and credible exploration of all areas of psychology represented by the contributors. Despite the free tenor of the conversations, I attempted to ask all of my contributors’ questions about:

studies, experience and achievements of the interviewees in their areas of specialization;

the root causes of problems affecting the field of psychology and comprising what is being referred to with increasing frequency as the crisis in psychology;

ways these problems can be resolved;

achievements of psychology as a scientific discipline;

the challenges facing psychology; and

recommendations for people just getting their professional career in psychology started.

The order in which these issues are addressed in the interviews is not fixed, but rather results from the natural character of each conversation. The questions have not been standardized, in order to avoid becoming overly schematic and preventing boredom in the reader. Answers to some of these questions are not to be found in the transcriptions of the conversations. This is because some of the contributors did not consider themselves competent to respond to those questions, or simply preferred not to. In these cases, I have spared the reader’s time and patience by removing sterile passages from the transcripts, with the consent of the interviewees.

All the conversations are preceded by a short profile of the interviewee and his or her research, which should contribute to a better understanding of the issues raised. Each interview is accompanied by a References section with titles referred to by both the author and his interviewee, as well as Selected Readings containing some of the most significant publications of the interviewee, mainly books.

Because the order of presentation of outstanding figures in any field bears with it the suggestion of an implicit hierarchy, in the book I have decided to present the interviews in the order in which they were conducted. The book’s table of contents, particularly the order in which the conversations are presented, should in no event be considered a ranking of my contributors.

References

Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Park, J. (2014). An incomplete list of eminent psychologists of the modern era. Archives of Scientific Psychology,2(1), 20–31.Crossref

Haggbloom, S. J., Warnick, R., Warnick, J. E., Jones, V. K., Yarbrough, G. L., Russell, T. M., & Monte, E. (2002). The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Review of General Psychology, 6(2), 139–152.

Ratzinger, J. C., & Messori, V. (1987). The Ratzinger report. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

The Best Schools. (2019, June 14). The 50 most influential living psychologists in the world. Retrived from https://​thebestschools.​org/​features/​most-influential-psychologists-world/​.

Tjentz. (2013, September 5). 30 Most influential psychologists working today. Best Masters in Psychology. Retrived from https://​www.​bestmastersinpsy​chology.​com/​30-most-influential-psychologists-working-today/​.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. WitkowskiShaping Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50003-0_2

2. Elizabeth F. Loftus: Cognitive Psychology, Witness Testimony and Human Memory

Tomasz Witkowski¹  

(1)

Wroclaw, Poland

Tomasz Witkowski

Email: [e-mail]

Zealous conviction is a dangerous substitute for an open mind.

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Filmmakers rarely make blockbusters out of the lives of scholars. That said, the first director who decides to make a film about the life and times of Elizabeth Loftus won’t have to do very much to keep viewers’ attention and build the suspense. Her biography is a ready-made script, full of dramatic plot twists, a riveting struggle of good against evil, honor against dishonor, and truth against lies. I am convinced that sooner or later we will see the history of this exceptional life on the big screen. I arrived at this belief in the course of reading pages and pages of biographical material, interviews and recollections prior to my conversation with Loftus. But the events that make her life’s history an attractive film subject are, to the person who experienced them, obstacles that absorb a tremendous amount of energy to overcome. Only a very few can successfully manage them, and fewer still rise above them while remaining faithful to ideals. Among these few, we may invariably find Elizabeth Loftus.

Beth Fishman, the girl who would become Elizabeth Loftus, early on in her childhood was put to the test in a way that would break many. When she was 6, a babysitter molested her. When Beth was 14, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. The obituary called it an accident, but Beth’s father suspected suicide. Two years after she lost her mother, Beth lost her home. A brush fire destroyed her house together with over 400 other homes in broader neighborhood. Despite these difficult experiences in 1966, and despite being raised to expect little more from life than being a wife and mother, she entered Stanford’s graduate program in mathematical psychology. She was the only woman admitted to the program that year, and her classmates wagered among themselves whether she would graduate.

But she did and she started her research focused on the organization of semantic information in long-term memory. But that what she was doing was not something she wanted to devote her life to. She decided to seek out research fields of greater social relevance and begin a new line of research into how memory works in real-world settings, beginning the empirical study of eyewitness testimony. Soon she developed the misinformation effect paradigm, which demonstrated that the memories of eyewitnesses are altered after being exposed to incorrect information about an event—through leading questions or other forms of post-event information; and that memory is highly malleable and open to suggestion. The misinformation effect became one of the most influential and widely known effects in psychology, and Loftus’ early work on misinformation generated hundreds of follow-up studies.

Loftus, however, was not only interested in laboratory work. She was curious about how her discoveries applied to real-life situations, in real court cases, to real witnesses. So she asked for permission to observe courtroom trials. One of them led her to write an article titled Reconstructing Memory: The Incredible Eyewitness, which was published in the popular science magazine Psychology Today (Loftus 1974). To her surprise, this seemingly insignificant piece led to a flood of phone calls from lawyers requesting her help with their cases. This was the start of a new chapter in her life, which led to her participation as a memory expert in over 250 hearings and trials. She consulted or testified in dozens of famous cases: Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menendez brothers, the Oklahoma City bombing, and many more.

After Loftus had become a bit bored with the routine of the standard eyewitness cases, she was asked, in 1990, to participate in the unusual case of George Franklin, who stood accused of murder; but the only evidence against him was provided by his daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, who claimed that she had initially repressed the memory of him raping and murdering her childhood friend, Susan Nason, 20 years earlier, and had only recently recovered it while undergoing therapy. Loftus took an interest in the case because while she gave evidence about the malleability of memory, she had to concede that the research on memory distortion involved changing memories for small details of an event. This was somewhat different from the particular kind of memory Franklin-Lipsker was claiming to have, namely witnessing a rape and murder, and enduring years of other traumas that had supposedly been repressed. Could these huge memories be planted? Loftus was not aware that participation in this case would not only radically change her research, but would also turn her entire private life upside-down.

Admitting that she did not know whether it was possible to implant false memories for entire events that had never taken place, Loftus began work to find out whether some of these recovered memories might in fact be false memories, created by the suggestive techniques used by some therapists at the time. After many attempts, she developed together with her students Jim Coan and Jacqueline Pickrell the lost in the mall technique. The method involves attempting to implant a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall as a child and testing whether discussing a false event could produce a memory of an event that never happened. In her initial study, Loftus found that 25% of subjects came to develop a memory, for the event which had never actually taken place (Loftus 1999). She would later call these rich false memories. She thus proved something novel and powerful about the malleability of memory.

This was the beginning of the memory wars. Even before the article describing the lost in the mall study made it to press, it was met with the intense criticism of supporters of repressed memory therapy (Loftus 1999), whose interests she directly threatened. For Loftus, this was the beginning of an exceptionally difficult period of hate mail, death threats, public attacks, and ostracism, which we spoke about during our interview. But the worst was yet to come. In 1997, David Corwin and his colleague Erna Olafson published a case study of Jane Doe (real name Nicole Taus), which was, in their opinion, an apparently bona fide case of an accurate, recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse. Skeptical, Loftus and her colleague Melvin Guyer decided to investigate further. Using public records and interviewing people connected to Taus, they uncovered information Corwin had not included in his original article—information that they thought strongly suggested Taus’ memory of abuse was probably false. While Loftus and Guyer were conducting their investigation, Taus contacted the University of Washington and accused Loftus of breaching her privacy. In response, the university confiscated Loftus’ files and put her under investigation for 21 months, forbidding her to share her findings in the meantime. It took Loftus two hard years to win a letter of exoneration and another six years to get rid of Jane’s subsequent lawsuit, which went all the way to the California Supreme Court. In their report on Jane Doe, published in the Skeptical Inquirer in 2002, Loftus and Guyer affirmed their duty to uncover the whole truth and presented the results of their investigation (Loftus and Guyer 2002a, b).

Although eventually exonerated of any wrongdoing, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Loftus. She could not forgive the University of Washington for the manner in which they had handled the most difficult case she had ever encountered. She moved to the University of California, Irvine.

Today, Loftus is most interested in what some term memory engineering. Is it possible to insert false memories that can bring positive effects? This is the main question she is seeking the answers to, and much as in the case of most other questions she has taken on, her efforts are proving effective. For example, her more recent research demonstrated that we can convince people of their having been averse to certain foods in their childhood, and they will begin to avoid those foods if we implant the memory well enough. While this example may seem a bit frivolous, the fact that false memories can modify our present behaviors is another of Loftus’ fundamental discoveries, which creates limitless possibilities for developing new therapeutic approaches. Apart from the possibilities that her present research is developing, there are also numerous ethical questions.

Professor Loftus, most lay people imagine that a psychologist’s work consists mainly in examining people using tests and questionnaires, conversing with them, and interpreting their responses. Yet there was a time in your professional life when you were accompanied at lectures by plainclothes bodyguards, and you yourself learned how to shoot. When I talk about this, people wonder what, exactly, a psychologist had to do to fear for her life in public places.

The trouble that I faced started after I began questioning some of the practices of some psychotherapists. What was happening was that people were going into therapy with one problem—maybe they were depressed, maybe they had an eating disorder—and they were coming out of this therapy with another problem, a different problem. Horrible childhood memories of horrible abuse, allegedly perpetrated upon them by their parents or other relatives, or former neighbors. And when I began to investigate these cases, it appeared as if it was some of these psychological practices that were leading people to develop false memories. And when I began to write about this, it made a lot of people mad. It made some of the therapists mad. It made some of the patients who thought they’d recovered these memories mad. It made some lawyers, who wanted to sue on behalf of these accusing patients, mad. For a while, there were these threats. Now things have died down a little bit but the problem is not over.

How long did this period of hatred last?

I first started learning about these cases around 1990, and then I co-authored a book called The Myth of Repressed Memory about this problem in 1994. I had already published a big article in American Psychologist in 1993, so probably that article and that book brought me to the attention of many of the people who would be angry about these ideas. So, throughout the 90s this was a problem. What happened in the mid and late 90s is that people who once thought they had recovered repressed memories of horrible abuse began to realize their memories were false, and they then sued their former therapists for planting false memories. And that generated the tide of change, because millions of dollars were then paid out to patients who had been led down this horrible path.

And has this period definitely concluded now?

No, there are still cases of this. Things are a little bit different now—for example, the clergy abuse cases. You have some genuine victims of abuse by priests and other religious figures. There’s nothing really fishy about the memories, they aren’t claiming they repressed them, but when they go public, it brings hundreds of other people, not all of whom were abused. But some of them claim to have recovered repressed memories, and they try to use the initial accusers as corroboration for their own story. So, there are still problems out there. And there are still families that are getting destroyed by these kinds of dubious accusations.

Of course, there is no justification for the manifestations of hatred towards you by people whose interests you threatened, but we can try to understand them or rationalize their behavior. However, you also had similar experiences at the hands of scientists—people that we’re trained to think hold the truth up as one of the highest values. Why did these people in particular attack you?

Their social and political beliefs and opinions were just so strong that they wanted to ignore the science. They couldn’t help themselves, and that’s how sometimes you would see scientists get into this controversy and insist that the experiments that I and others did weren’t relevant, or that we were ignoring important data. Every now and then they would say things like science isn’t the only way to know things.

During that worst period, did you ever think about walking away from it all?

I don’t think so. One of the worst things that happened was when one of these individuals, whom we’ll call Jane Doe, came to believe that her mother had sexually abused her when she was a child. I believe this was because of the suggestive things she was put through. She filed a lawsuit that we had to defend against for many years. This went on until 2009, in fact, but finally that case was resolved.

Was that the most difficult moment for you?

Actually, before Jane Doe sued me and my co-author and the magazine, she had complained to my former university that I was looking into her life and she was upset. My former university then began an investigation of me, and that was a bad period, because I had no idea how it would end up. Potentially my job was in jeopardy, but eventually after a couple of years of investigation I was exonerated of any wrongdoing and could get back to my work.

In past interviews, when speaking about yourself you have emphasized how important those moments in life were when you realized that you wanted to do research of greater social relevance. It’s fair to say that not only did you choose a research field of greater social relevance, but that you also touched a nerve. How many researchers-psychologists think like you do and choose a similar path?

When I went from doing very theoretical memory work and began to study the memory of witnesses to crimes, accidents and other legally important events, that was in the early 1970s. Not very many people were doing that kind of work. While most other memory scientists were doing very theoretical work with very simple stimuli, I started showing people films of accidents and crimes, and studying the memory of these much more complex events. Today, lots of people do that kind of work.

Are those who prefer to remain in the world of abstract relations discouraged from engaging real issues by the potential consequences they might experience?

It’s possible that some are. But it’s also the case that for a long time within the field of psychology, if you did very theoretical kind, abstract work, that was held in higher regard than if you did work that had obvious practical applications. Today I think people and many of the funding agencies do want you