Susan Clancy

Susan A. Clancy is a cognitive psychologist and Associate professor in Consumer behaviour at INCAE as well as being a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

In 2001, Clancy received her PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University.

Though originally working in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University for eight years, Clancy now works at INCAE, where she is Associate Professor in Consumer Behavior and Research Director of INCAE's Center for Women's Leadership.

Clancy is a researcher in the field of memory. Her collaborative scientific research mainly focuses on the impacts of trauma on memory and individual susceptibility to false memory creation. She initially conducted her research on people with supposed 'recovered memories' of childhood abuse as she believed that at least some of these memories may be false. However, although she was sure that many of these memories were false, she could not accurately determine whether the subjects had or had not been abused in childhood. To rectify this problem, Clancy then shifted her attention to recovered memories of events that almost certainly never happened- those of alien abductions. This allowed her to investigate possible individual differences that may make one more likely to develop false memories.

In October 2005 her book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens was published. Clancy came to the subject of alien abductions while studying recovered memories, a phenomenon her research has called into question. Because her original research subjects, people who had recovered memories (generally via hypnosis) of sexual abuse, proved a politically sensitive group to debunk, Clancy decided to aim instead at the claims and recovered memories of alleged outer-space alien abductees. This latter group was not viewed sympathetically by the public, thus refuting their claims would not be politically problematic, nor did its claims of alien encounters have any scientific credibility to begin with. Therefore, Clancy could focus her work on determining how exactly people came to believe they were abducted by aliens, and how they recovered memories of such a thing, while she assumed the factual nature of their claims to be prima facie false.

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