Just because someone tells you something with a lot of confidence and detail and emotion, it doesn't mean it really happened.
Psychologists
Elizabeth Loftus
U.S. cognitive psychologist (b.1944). Her 1974 car-crash study showed verb choice can rewrite memory, founding the science of eyewitness reliability. She has testified in 300+ trials and led recovered-memory critique.
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Elizabeth Loftus's Other Quotes
Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.
These results are consistent with the view that the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one's memory of that event.
Memory is a bit like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.
I have been called an authority on the malleability of memory. ... I warn those involved in legal proceedings that memory is malleable, that it can be written over, that it is like a vast blackboard onto which we can write and erase infinitely.