Julia Shaw (psychologist)

Shaw was born in Cologne, West Germany and grew up in Canada. In 2004 she started a BSc in psychology at the Simon Fraser University.[1] She went on to complete a Masters in Psychology and Law at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.[2] In 2009, she returned to Canada and was awarded a PhD at the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral thesis was entitled "Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime".[3] Shaw remained in Canada, a lecturer at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia.[4] In 2013 she became Lecturer in forensic psychology at University of Bedfordshire.[5] She joined London South Bank University as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in 2015, before becoming an honorary[6] Research Associate at University College London in 2017.[7][8]

Shaw's primary expertise is in false memories and how law enforcement can use "tactics [that] may lead people to recall crimes that never occurred".[3] In one of her studies, she succeeded in getting 70% of the participants to create false memories or beliefs of events from their childhood that never took place, and this study was covered extensively in mainstream media.[1][9] The validity of this 70% finding has, however, been criticised by colleagues who recoded the data to conclude 26-30% of participants had false memories (with those with false beliefs without memory details not being counted as false memories in this recoding).[10] Shaw addressed the criticism in a 2018 article in Psychological Science, where she explained that the original coding categorized false beliefs as false memories--in keeping with past research that argued memory and belief are difficult to truly distinguish. [11]

Shaw is a contributor to Scientific American.[12] She gives public lectures on psychology and memory.[13][14][15] In 2016 she created a PBS Nova documentary, "Memory Hackers".[16] She contributes to podcasts and radio, and her work has been featured on the Discovery Channel and BBC, as well as appearing in Der Spiegel, Russia Today and The Times.[17][18][19][20][21][22] In 2016, Random House published her first book "The Memory Illusion", which has since been translated into 14 different languages.[23][24] In 2017 she gave a TEDx talk, "How False Memories Corrupt Our Identities, Politics and Justice System" at TEDxBergen and "Is Your Memory Just an Illusion?" at TEDxPorto.[25][26]

• The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory. Random House, 2016, ISBN 978-1847947628
• Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side. Canongate Books Ltd., 2018, ISBN 978-1786891303

• Official website
• Julia Shaw - Memory hacking: The science of learning in the 21st Century (video of conference talk, 63 mins)