Month: February 2015

False memory, Instagram, and Brian Williams

In our Honors General Psychology course, we studied memory a couple weeks ago. The students read a Scientific American article by Elizabeth Loftus about her research on misinformation effects in memory. They were also assigned to write a response paper, and many of them related stories of their own memory fabrications and distortions. Here are a few (anonymous) excerpts:

After thinking about the influence others can have on childhood memories I realized that I mostly remember the stories my family has told me about my childhood; I myself do not remember the events.
When I was four years old, my older sister willed me to remember eating pizza and disliking it. Though I did not remember this event at first, I came to believe it after repeated suggestion. From personal experience, once a false memory is in place, it feels extremely real and convincing. For the next seven years, I would not eat pizza, which is one of my favorite foods.
if my parents retell a story of them buying a new car multiple times, even though I was not present for the purchase, I start visualizing the trip to the car lot, and those visualizations become more real to me. The more I think about the trip, the more details I fill in, and the more real it seems. This type of situation has occurred many times in my life. Having lived through this odd occurrence myself, I am able to easily believe the data collected by Dr. Loftus.
A couple of recent opinion pieces in the New York Times help illustrate these points well. In “Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives,” novelist Teddy Wayne explores whether snapshot photos easily taken with mobile devices are beginning to supplant memory for the experiences themselves. In contrast with previous generations, where film and developing was relatively expensive, we cheaply and easily document the minutia of everyday life via photos and videos in the cloud, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. Then the memories surrounding those snapshots and clips slip away.
He cites some research showing this:

Linda Henkel, a professor of psychology at Fairfield University, wrote a 2014 study in the journal Psychological Science in which subjects were given digital cameras and led around an art museum on a guided tour. They were told to photograph certain objects and merely observe others. The participants remembered fewer details about the objects if they had photographed them, as they effectively outsourced their memory to the camera.

“In general, we remember the photographs,” Dr. Henkel said in an interview. “It’s like the family stories we tell. There’s the original experience, and then the story everyone tells every Thanksgiving. The story becomes exaggerated, a schema of the original event. The physical photo doesn’t change over time, but the photo becomes the memory.”

He also points to the recent news story about TV news anchor Brian Williams, who has been accused of lying about his experiences covering the war in Iraq, and suspended from his job for 6 months. His story transformed over the years from being behind a helicopter that was shot down to being in the helicopter that was shot down. Tara Parker-Pope writes a blog post about the possibility (I will say “likelihood”) that it is not so much intentional lie but unintentional memory distortions. She quotes Elizabeth Loftus:

“You’ve got all these people saying the guy’s a liar and convicting him of deliberate deception without considering an alternative hypothesis — that he developed a false memory,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a leading memory researcher and a professor of law and cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s a teaching moment, and a chance to really try to get information out there about the malleable nature of memory.”

As you will tell by some of the almost 1200 (!) comments to the blog, many people do not believe in the fallibility of memory. Perhaps they are convinced of their own memories as being infallible. I hope none of my students will fall into that camp after our reading and discussions.

Link to Teddy Wayne’s article “Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives”

Link to Tara Parker-Pope’s article “Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?”