Elizabeth Loftus

A witness pointed at a photograph and said it looked closest to the man who attacked her. By the trial, she was certain. She was also wrong.

Steve Titus lost his job, his engagement and his savings to a mistaken identification. The psychologist who worked on his case, Elizabeth Loftus, spent the next half-century asking the question it left behind: how does a memory travel from hesitant to unshakeable - and why does everyone in the courtroom, including the witness, mistake that growing confidence for growing accuracy?

In this concise, accessible gateway, Josh Graham traces Loftus's journey from a mathematics student in post-war Los Angeles to the most consequential - and most contested - memory researcher of her generation. Her experiments showed that memory is not a recording but a reconstruction: rebuilt each time we recall it, and open to editing by a single word in a question.

Inside, you'll discover:

• How one verb in a question changed what people said they saw - the 1974 car-crash study that launched the misinformation effect
• The "lost in the mall" experiment, and the fierce argument still running over how often a whole false memory can really be planted
• What modern science actually says about confidence: why courtroom certainty misleads, and why a witness's first answer can be worth trusting
• The memory wars - recovered memories, ruined families, and a scientist who became one of the most hated figures in American psychology for following her data
• A fair reckoning with the criticism: the cases, the lawsuits, and the charge that doubt about memory can be turned against people telling the truth

Loftus never claimed that memory is worthless, or that people who report abuse should be disbelieved. She showed something narrower and more unsettling: that a memory can be sincere, detailed, emotional - and mistaken. This is the ideal introduction to a body of work that has freed innocent people from prison, and that still asks uncomfortable questions of anyone who has ever been certain about the past.

Part of the Pioneers of Human Behaviour series: clear, honest, carefully researched gateways to the people who changed how we understand the mind.