Monthly Archives: November 2015

Memories are events remembered that occurred in the past. They can be trusted to some extent, however memories are not recorded like a camera, and they can be misleading in certain cases.

For instance, in Elizabeth Loftus’s speech, she tells the story of a man called Steve Titus, who was pronounced guilty for supposedly raping a female hitchhiker. In reality, he was on a date with his girlfriend and was on his way home. The photograph of Titus was shown to the rape victim and she stated that Titus looked similar to the rapist. However, later during the trial, she said that she was 100% positive that Titus was the rapist. Afterwards, the real rapist was found and Titus was released from prison. From this real life situation, it is clear that memories are not always reliable. As time passes, memories become foggy and less accurate, just like the memory of the rape victim in this situation. She went from “he looked similar to the rapist” to “I am absolutely sure that that is the guy” after some time passed. From this situation, we can know that false memories can really do a great deal of damage to an individual. Due to the false recount of the rape victim, it cost Titus a year in jail, the loss of his job and his fiancé. Subsequently, he started filing lawsuits against everyone he believed were responsible for his hardship and due to an excessive amount of stress, he died of a heart attack.

From this situation, we can determine that memories do provide knowledge of the past to some degree, however humans are not machines and cannot remember everything precisely. Our memories do tend to become muddled as time passes to the point of it becoming a false memory, at which point we cannot trust it, since it would give people the wrong kind of impression.

After reading the experiment carried out by the researcher Judith Baxter, I thought that it was a clever way of discovering the specific ways boys and girls would behave to certain situations. I think that this experiment has some strengths but also some limitations too.

Firstly, this experiment allowed the students to imagine themselves being in a real life situation. This way, the students would behave, think and react the same way they would if they actually survived a plane crash and they were stranded in a desert. From the recorded conversation, the readers can find hints that tell them whether it is a boy group or a girl group. For example, in the conversation within group B, one of the boys mentioned that they could use the gun to shoot the pilot. This sounds like the type of humour boys would have, and would most likely convince the readers that group B is the boy group. Group B also had a leader, and according to other data collected by researchers, boys usually would nominate a leader to speak for the group and collect opinions from other people. And therefore, this experiment shows the behaviour of how a girl group and a boy group would react in a situation like this.

This experiment also had a number of limitations though. First of all, the age group of this experiment is limited, which only included teenagers. If adults participated in this experiment, the way they handle the situation would most likely have quite a large difference on the way the teenagers handled it. Adults and older people would most probably not create any sort of humour and would take this situation more seriously. Also in group A of Baxter’s experiment, there were some disagreements between the students and they started to sound frustrated. However, both male and female adults may not have any disputes and would probably handle the situation with more patience. Therefore, this experiment simply proved that most teenage boys and girls would have a different way of dealing with a situation like this, however amongst adults, there won’t be much of a difference between male and female.

Real Life Situation: A sizzling pot was sitting on the stove, and one of the friends tries to trick the other one to touch the pot.

Tony and Andy are friends and both of them are spending the night at Tony’s house. They spot a pot that is sizzling on the stove in the kitchen. Tony tries to trick Andy to touch the pot by saying that it has cooled down already and that the texture of the pot feels nice. However, Andy refuses to touch it.

The reason why Andy did not touch the pot is because he is clearly able to see steam coming out of the pot. He also sees the flames under the pot on the stove and is able to hear the liquid bubbling in the pot. In addition to this, he is able to feel the heat of the steam when it blew across his face. From this, he knows that the pot is very hot. Hence, Andy knows that by touching the pot, he would most likely burn or injure his hand, which is why he refused to touch the pot.