Julia Shaw (psychologist)

Education and academic career

Shaw was born on January 20, 1987 in Cologne, West Germany and grew up in Germany and Canada. In 2004 she started a BSc in psychology at the Simon Fraser University. She went on to complete a master's degree in Psychology and Law at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. In 2009, she returned to Canada and was awarded a PhD at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her doctoral thesis was entitled "Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime". Shaw remained in Canada and was a lecturer at UBC until 2013 when she became a lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Bedfordshire. She joined London South Bank University as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in 2015, before becoming an honorary Research Associate in Psychology at UCL in 2017. She is the founder of the Bisexual Research Group and completed an MA in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Shaw specialises in false memories and how law enforcement can use "tactics [that] may lead people to recall crimes that never occurred". 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. 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). 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.