New ideas in psychology crime and law

In this issue, we introduce a new feature for the journal that we call ‘New Ideas in Psychology Crime and Law’. Academic journal articles often review prior research or describe a set of experiments or other empirical studies. Those articles form the backbone of moving our field forward. You will continue to see many more of those types of articles at PCL. But in ‘New Ideas in Psychology, Crime and Law’ we ask thought leaders in our discipline to look around the corner and describe what they see as coming next as our discipline continues to advance and progress. New Ideas in Psychology Crime and Law will be brief, invited articles, designed to look ahead for the ideas that are likely to shape the research agenda in the years ahead.

I am proud to announce that our first authors for this new type of journal article are Elizabeth Loftus and Zoe Klemfuss who describe the future of research on the misinformation effect. I first came across the work of Elizabeth Loftus in a cognitive psychology class. We had been assigned an article published in the New Scientist titled ‘The Malleability of Human Memory’. The article described a mind-blowing set of studies showing that changing the wording of questions, or the way an event is described, can alter a witness’s memory reports for the event. People remembered barns that didn't exist, broken glass where there was none, or altered their memory for the color of objects they had seen. Misinformation could fill in gaps in memory, alter existing memories, or create entirely new ones. The New Scientist article also highlighted the value of tying applied research in psychology and the law to basic theoretical mechanisms described in cognitive and social psychology, not to mention a bit of Kant thrown in as well. Needless to say, once I read the New Scientist article I was hooked. I read everything I could find by Loftus, and the fallibility of human memory became my central research endeavor as well. Loftus is joined in this New Ideas article by Zoe Klemfuss. Klemfuss, like Loftus, has focused her career on how memories can be altered, particularly in children. Her work applied basic developmental perspectives on children’s growing narrative abilities to how they recount eyewitness events, sometimes accurately and sometimes inaccurately, and the dangers posed by misinformation together.

This broad, theoretically guided, philosophically fascinating, and practically important area of the malleability of human memory, has inspired a ton of research, changed theoretical perspectives on human memory, and has impacted legal proceedings around the world. Not bad! And, you might think there is nothing new to learn. But the New Ideas paper we roll out in this issue shows that nothing can be further from the truth. Check it out and you will see what I mean!