On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 3:29 AM, JW <[email protected]> wrote: > I'll put together a response to your last post when I feel more coherent. > Meantime, I'd like to take advantage of your knowledge to ask a couple of > questions: > > Is every individual equally likely to have false memories? > > Is each memory that an individual has equally likely to be false? >
These are good questions, good enough that we don't have complete answers to them yet. I would be careful about thinking about memories dichotomously, as either false or true. Memories of any complexity are not retrieved, they are reconstructed, and each time this happens, they are more or less accurate, depending on several variables. It is fair to say that everyone distorts memories with high frequency, but it is probably also fair to say that some of the variables that are at play are personality variables, so that some kinds of people are probably more prone to more distortion more frequently, than are others. One of the most powerful memory distorters is misleading retrieval cues (for example, if I ask a witness to a crime "what color hat was the perpetrator wearing?", they are much more likely to later report remembering that the perp was wearing a hat, even though they were not). Thus, we would expect that people who are more sensitive to these kinds of cues - who pay more attention to them, who care more about them, who are more influenced by them, will be more vulnerable to memory distortion. I would not say that every event that happens to us is equally vulnerable to memory distortion. I am more likely to falsely remember that I had Captain Crunch for breakfast 6 months ago when I really had Frosted Flakes than I am to falsely remember that my father anally raped me 6 months ago when he really did not (especially in my case, since my father was not alive 6 months ago). Having said that, almost any event can be falsely remembered. Not only do we know that people falsely remember being sexually abused by parents as children, we know they can falsely remember being lost in a shopping mall when they were a kid, or falsely remember spilling punch on a bride at her wedding. And of course we know that people regularly distort and invent details that they witness during the commission of a crime. In the 1970s a couple of psychologists reported a phenomenon they called "flashbulb memories", based on reports they gathered from people 10 years after the JFL assassination of vivid, detailed memories of exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the murder. The problem with this was that the psychologists (Brown and Kulick) did not have access to independent accounts of what the people were actually doing, so they had no way of assessing the accuracy of these memories, just that people were unusually confident in them. Since then, after every major national trauma, psychologists furiously ask their students to write down exactly what they were doing when they heard about the event (and often, what they were doing when they experienced some other, trivial event in the same time frame). A year or two later the students are contacted and asked about their memories. Invariably we find that while the people are extremely confident about the accuracy of their memories for the dramatic event (e.g. Challenger explosion, Palme assassination, Death of Diana, OJ Simpson verdict, 9-11), the accuracy is in fact no greater than that for the trivial event, and contains distortions and inventions. One reason it is easy for me to believe that Williams' helicopter memory was an honest distortion rather than a conscious lie is that it fits the pattern of the most common kinds of memory distortions: a dramatic event, periodically retrieved and retold to an audience for dramatic or entertainment purposes. In such a circumstance we tend to confuse the actual event both with what we said about it the first few times we recollected it, and with what people around us said at the time of those retrievals, and eventually with what we thought or daydreamed about those events. Ten years later, it is almost impossible to tell subjectively what actually happened ten years ago, and what has been accreted over the decade - it is like playing that old game of operator. Which is also why, my main criticism of Williams is not that he distorted his memory of the incident (regardless of how dramatic and emotional the event, it could easily be falsely remembered) but that a person in his business should know better than most how unreliable human memory is, and should be careful not to rely on it when reporting events in a context that looks like that of his job as a reporter. I don't think the penalty for this crime should be termination - that would set the bar for termination at a level that would eventually require that every journalist be fired, unless we were explicit that the penalty is only termination if you get caught. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! 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