Posted by Danny L. Newton on February 26, 1999 at 16:15:44:
In Reply to: Elizabeth Loftus' Fraudulent Shopping Mall Study - EXPOSED posted by lurker on February 26, 1999 at 11:22:48:
I barely remember this study but it seems like it was printed, in part, in Scientific American a few years ago. So help me out here. Does this mean that those people really were lost in the mall? I don't understand the word "fraudulent" being applied to the study. It was a small study and it had a few problems with methodology but do you think that it was so flawed that it could not be repeated by others and yield similar results?
I did not see a lot of difference between what was done in the mall study and the work done by Cici, et al to show memory manipulation in children. Was the Cici work simalarly "fraudulent"?
I would also like to hear about the exact way ethics were breached. Were children harmed by this or the Cici study methodology? Would children be damaged by finding out that they had been lied to by a trusted adult? I've been having a slight recurring problem with a few details on Santa Clause. Mom just inheirited a bunch of money, do you think that she might be goaded into letting me have some of that money if this Santa Clause thing does not check out? Sorry Mom, business is business.
Danny L. Newton
: ...just published in "Ethics & Behavior", 9 (1), 39-50 and 61-68, 1999
: "Lost in a shopping mall"- a breach of professional ethics. by Crook & Dean.
: Loftus responds.
: The "lost in a shopping mall" study has been cited to support claims that
: psychotherapists can implant memories of false autobiographical information
: of childhood trauma in their patients. The mall study originated in 1991 as
: 5 pilot experiments involving 3 children and 2 adult participants. The
: University of Washington Human Subjects Committee granted approval for the
: mall study on August 10, 1992. The preliminary results with the 5 pilot
: subjects were announced 4 days later. An analysis of the mall study shows
: that beyond the external misrepresentations, internal scientific
: methodological errors cast doubt on the validity of the claims that have
: been attributed to the mall study within scholarly and legal arenas. The
: minimal involvement-- or, in some cases, negative impact -- of collegial
: consultation, academic supervision, and peer review throughout the
: evolution of the mall study are reviewed.