Julia Shaw (psychologist)

Shaw was born on January 20, 1987[1] in Cologne, West Germany and grew up in Germany and Canada. In 2004 she started a BSc in psychology at the Simon Fraser University.[2] She went on to complete a Masters in Psychology and Law at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.[3] 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".[4] Shaw remained in Canada, a lecturer at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia.[5] In 2013 she became a lecturer in forensic psychology at University of Bedfordshire.[6] She joined London South Bank University as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in 2015, before becoming an honorary[7] Research Associate at University College London in 2017.[5][8] She is the founder of the Bisexual Research Group and is studying for an MA in Queer History from Goldsmiths, University of London.[9]

Shaw specialises in false memories and how law enforcement can use "tactics [that] may lead people to recall crimes that never occurred".[4] In one of her studies, she stated that in a controlled setting she was able to construct false memories of childhood events in 70% of participants using suggestive memory-retrieval techniques.[2][10][11] 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).[12] 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.[13]

Shaw was a contributor to the popular science magazine Scientific American between 2015 and 2017.[14] She contributed to the PBS documentary Memory Hackers (2016).[15] In the same year Shaw released her first popular science book The Memory Illusion, which was about false memories.[16]

In 2017 she gave TEDx talks on false memories.[17][18]

Shaw's second book Making Evil was about true crime. A review in The Guardian described it as "chattily written" but criticised her use of discredited experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment to illustrate her points.[19] A reviewer for The Herald called it "fascinating" and "convincing".[20]. A review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung criticised its simplistic writing and felt that it only provided discussion points for small talk at parties.[21]

In July 2020, Shaw started to co-host the true crime podcast Bad People with comedian Sofie Hagen, on BBC Sounds.[22] She also co-hosts the German language true crime podcast Böse with singer-songwriter Jazzy Gudd which started in January 2022.[23]

Shaw came out as bisexual in 2019.[24] She is in a civil partnership with employment law barrister Paul Livingston.[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., 2019, ISBN 978-1786891303

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