QED rewatch: False Memory and Satanic Abuse (2023)

Psychological research has proven to us time and again that even the memories that we see as being fundamental to who we are and how we see ourselves are prone to bias, distortion, and even outright fabrication.

For most of us, the way our memories warp and skew away from the facts can be relatively innocuous, but even inadvertent massaging and implanting of memories can have disastrous consequences - as we saw during the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s, where ‘recovered’ memories of ritualistic abuse were used to justify a sweeping moral panic, and a swathe of false arrests and imprisonment. And while we like to tell ourselves those events are in the past, there are still therapists using flawed techniques to ‘recover’ - or accidentally create - memories of Satanic abuse, even contributing to the rise of the QAnon conspiracy movement.

This panel from QED 2023 discussed how can our minds be manipulated, how we can know who we really are when we can’t trust what we remember, and how we can guard ourselves against the history of an inadvertently manufactured moral panic. Featuring Kevin Felstead, Professor Chris French, Professor Ciara Greene, and chair Deborah Hyde.

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