Imagine you’re chatting with your friend about an outfit someone wore the other day. You make a comment about their orange sweater, and your friend immediately says, “They didn’t wear an orange sweater - the sweater they wore was bright pink.” At first, you’re a bit doubtful, but your friend is absolutely positive that it was bright pink. Eventually, you’re completely convinced that the sweater was bright pink and you probably were thinking of someone else’s orange sweater. Later that day, you run into that person and find out you were right all along - they were in fact wearing an orange sweater.
Things like this happen all the time. Just as Stanley’s colleagues couldn’t remember whether or not he had a mustache, your memory of an orange sweater was called into question by your friend’s more confident memory of a bright pink sweater. Why were you so easily persuaded to believe a false memory? If memory acts like a tape recorder, how come we are unable to retrieve the tape and play it back when it is most needed?
Despite popular belief, memory does not act like a tape recorder. Instead, it acts more like a Wikipedia page - you can go in and retrieve information and edit as you please, but so can everybody else. You may be reasonably certain that something happened, but any outside influence suggesting that it didn’t happen can call your memory into question. But to what extent? The color of a sweater is a trivial detail, something easily forgotten. You would probably remember a significant experience or traumatizing event - for example, if you were the victim of a violent crime. Surely you would remember the face of your assailant!
This has been statistically and experimentally disproven. Each year, thousands of people in the US are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. About three-quarters[1] of these wrongful convictions is due to faulty eyewitness memory, likely a result of misleading suggestions that were introduced following the crime. In a 1994 experiment[2], observers suggested to participants that they had been lost in the mall as a child, though this was untrue. In the following weeks, 25% of the subjects reported clear memories of the fictional incident. Since then, studies have supported a false memory rate of between 30 and 50%. In another experiment[3], military soldiers were subjected to stress-inducing interrogations simulating prisoner-of-war scenarios. Following the interrogation, the soldiers were fed false information while being questioned about their interrogator. When asked to pick the man that interrogated them, the soldiers often singled out a man that didn’t even remotely resemble the actual interrogator. This conclusively proved that memory is malleable, or that people’s minds are susceptible to suggestions and the formation of completely fictitious memories.
Misinformation is all around us. Other people’s conflicting memories, the media, and even something as simple as the way you pose a question can lead to the construction of false memories. Misinformation is impossible to avoid. So what can we do about it? Simply being aware of misinformation is a start. A database run by a select group of trained researchers has greater reliability than a database that can be edited by everyone. Similarly, by looking out for things that may alter your knowledge or beliefs, you act as a safeguard of your memories, filtering what can or cannot edit your memories.
Although this phenomenon leads to the construction of false memories, which is generally seen as a bad thing, it can also be used to serve good, ethical causes. For example, people are inclined to foods they associate with positive memories and disinclined to foods they associate with negative memories. A parent of a picky eater could use misinformation to plant a false memory in the child’s mind, causing them to associate brussel sprouts with a positive memory, such as spending time with a loved one. Conversely, the parent could lead the child to associate sugary sweets with a negative memory, such as getting sick. It must be emphasized, however, that misinformation is not a weapon to exploit. While people’s opinions may differ on how this phenomenon should be used - or whether it should be used at all - misinformation plays a significant role in our everyday lives.
Links
[1]https://wmich.edu/sociology/causes-wrongful-conviction
[2]https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XQze2hIAAGYP8ckl
Elizabeth Loftus “How Reliable is Your Memory?” https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_memory?language=en
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