Question

1. What does Loftus and Laney's (and many other researchers') work on false memory effects tell us about social constructed knowledge?

2. Thinking especially of what Mills wrote on "white ignorance": how can false memory serve existing power structures, and why is it more likely to serve those structures than to work against them?

3. According to the research they cite, Loftus and Laney show that memory isn't just fallible, but rather that we are prone to strongly believe and develop elaborate narratives around events that did not occur. If this is the case, what does that say about the basis of most of our knowledge?

Answer 1

1. The work on false memory reveal that memory cannot be conceptualised as a apparatus that records events with details. Rather, the memory of events maybe fabricated or distorted based on several internal and external factors. False memory therefore testified for the social constructed view of knowledge as it holds that one may never know what is universally right or wrong, good or bad but we can only make such deductions based on commonly held notions and mutually agreed upon knowledge. Social constructionism rejects the view that an ndividual’s mind is a mirror that represents reality, much like the earlier conception of memory as a tape recorder.

Please post the other questions separately.