Thanks pgage. That was an interesting read. I can Confirm that my memory of family or personal events decades ago is definitely close, yet inaccurate or embellished in some way.
On Feb 17, 2015, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: >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. -- Sent with K-@ Mail - the evolution of emailing. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
