Elizabeth Fishman was born on October 16, 1944. She was born in Los Angeles, California. Her mother was very depressed and drowned in 1959. It is unsure whether it was an accident or suicide. Elizabeth was only fifteen years old. Two years later, a fire swept through her neighborhood and her family lost their home. Originally, Elizabeth wanted to become a math teacher but she found her calling in psychology. In 1966, she completed her Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a year later finished her Master of Arts at Stanford. Also at Stanford, in 1970, she accomplished her PhD. While in graduate school, she met Geoffrey Loftus and was married to him in 1968. In the 1970s, Elizabeth Loftus began…show more content… As an experiment, subjects were shown a clip of a traffic accident. After watching it, the subjects were asked a series of questions including, “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” However, some were instead asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed into” each other. Loftus found that simply using “smashed” instead of “hit” changed how the subjects remembered the accident. This simulated the way police officers, accident investigators, and attorneys would question an eyewitness. The Misinformation Effect is a “memory phenomenon that can introduce misleading or incorrect information into memory and even contribute to the formation of false memories (“What is the Misinformation Effect? 2012).” Memory is highly malleable and open to suggestion. Loftus once said, “Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: you can go in there and change it, but so can other people.” Why the Misinformation Effect happens is still not completely known. There are a few theories including the possibility that the misleading information overwrites the original memory. However, it could be because of constructive