<2016GOPVoter>I don't need some expert telling me factual information about a topic!</2016GOPVoter>
On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 10:14 AM PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > I attended a session at a psychology convention last week with Dr. > Elizabeth Loftus of UC Irvine, the world's premier expert on false memory. > Her first slide was a photograph of Brian Williams, followed by one of > Hillary Clinton. She then played a 90 second tape from her answering > service of some guy deriding her for having explained William's false > reports as consistent with what we know about how normal memory works. The > room full of about 500 psychologists, graduate and undergraduate students > all laughed - at the caller. > > What I wrote when the story first broke (see below) was that every > psychologist who taught anything related to memory understood Williams's > memory mistakes and illusions to be within the normal range of human > experience. Loftus is a cognitive and really social psychologist - she is a > little less interested in individual differences, but did present some data > that certain kinds of people are more likely to experience false memory in > certain kinds of situations. So it is possible (we need better research on > this), that narcissistic or maybe extroverted, attention-seeking people are > more likely to experience false memories that over dramatize themselves. > > > On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 9:47 AM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I guarantee you that there is at least one psychology professor at every >> college and university in the college doing exactly what I am doing today, >> which is grabbing video and images and text about this event to integrate >> into my lectures on the fallibility and social construction of human >> memory. This is essentially the same thing that happened to Hillary in >> 2008, and her mis-remembering of dodging bullets on the tarmac. It is also >> the same thing that every single one of us does at least once a week, >> telling a story after dinner, or over drinks to buddies, elaborating and >> distorting events to make them more interesting, more flattering, shorter, >> longer, easier to remember or more consistent with the current context. >> Yes, some of this is intentional and conscious exaggeration, bordering on >> lying, but most of it happens at a non-conscious level. >> >> That is not to excuse Williams. A journalist more than most should be >> wary of the limits of human memory, and the importance of accuracy, and >> double check facts before reporting on air important events. And, to Joe's >> point, we would like to see credible journalists (that is, journalists >> interested in retaining their credibility) being more reluctant to report >> stories in which they themselves at the subject - and when they do, they >> must be doubly concerned with accuracy, and with checking the all too human >> tendency to inflate their own role in any story. >> >> I don't think that firing is a proportional response; I guess if NBC News >> wanted to suspend him for a week that would signify that they were taking >> it seriously. The problem is that the penalty for this kind of think should >> be that the population of news consumers downgrades Williams as a source of >> accurate and credible news; but in the last decade or two credibility has >> ceased to be a defining characteristic of any news source. Even with this >> flaw, Williams and NBC are a more credible source of news that anything >> available on cable. >> > -- -- 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.
