False memory


In psychology, a false memory is a phenomenon where someone recalls something that did not actually happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation, and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory.

Early work

The false memory phenomenon was initially investigated by psychological pioneers Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud.
Freud was fascinated with memory and all the ways it could be understood, used, and manipulated. Some claim that his studies have been quite influential in contemporary memory research, including the research into the field of false memory. Pierre Janet was a French neurologist also credited with great contributions into memory research. Janet contributed to false memory through his ideas on dissociation and memory retrieval through hypnosis.
In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted a study to investigate the effects of language on the development of false memory. The experiment involved two separate studies.
In the first study, 45 participants were randomly assigned to watch different videos of a car accident, in which separate videos had shown collisions at, and. Afterwards, participants filled out a survey. The survey asked the question, "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" The question always asked the same thing, except the verb used to describe the collision varied. Rather than smashed, other verbs used included bumped, collided, hit, or contacted. Participants estimated collisions of all speeds to average between to just below. If actual speed was the main factor in estimate, it could be assumed that participants would have lower estimates for lower speed collisions. Instead, the word being used to describe the collision seemed to better predict the estimate in speed rather than the speed itself.
The second experiment also showed participants videos of a car accident, but the phrasing of the follow-up questionnaire was critical in participant responses. 150 participants were randomly assigned to three conditions. Those in the first condition were asked the same question as the first study using the verb smashed. The second group was asked the same question as the first study, replacing smashed with hit. The final group was not asked about the speed of the crashed cars. The researchers then asked the participants if they had seen any broken glass, knowing that there was no broken glass in the video. The responses to this question had shown that the difference between whether broken glass was recalled or not heavily depended on the verb used. A larger sum of participants in the "smashed" group declared that there was broken glass.
In this study, the first point brought up in discussion is that the words used to phrase a question can heavily influence the response given. Second, the study indicates that the phrasing of a question can give expectations to previously ignored details, and therefore, a misconstruction of our memory recall. This indication supports false memory as an existing phenomenon.
Replications in different contexts have shown that different scenarios require different framing effects to produce differing memories.

Manifestations and types

Presuppositions and the misinformation effect

A presupposition is an implication through chosen language. If a person is asked, "What shade of blue was the wallet?", the questioner is, in translation, saying, "The wallet was blue. What shade was it?" The question's phrasing provides the respondent with a supposed "fact". This presupposition creates one of two separate effects: true effect and false effect.
  • In true effect, the implication was accurate: the wallet really was blue. That makes the respondent's recall stronger, more readily available, and easier to extrapolate from. A respondent is more likely to remember a wallet as blue if the prompt said that it was blue than if the prompt did not say so.
  • In false effect, the implication was actually false: the wallet was not blue even though the question asked what shade of blue it was. This convinces the respondent of its truth, which affects their memory. It can also alter responses to later questions to keep them consistent with the false implication.
Regardless of the effect being true or false, the respondent is attempting to conform to the supplied information, because they assume it to be true.
Loftus's meta-analysis on language manipulation studies suggested the misinformation effect taking hold on the recall process and products of the human memory. Even the smallest adjustment in a question, such as the article preceding the supposed memory, could alter the responses. For example, having asked someone if they had seen "the" stop sign, rather than "a" stop sign, provided the respondent with a presupposition that there was a stop sign in the scene. This presupposition increased the number of people responding that they had indeed seen the stop sign.
The strength of verbs used in conversation or questioning also has a similar effect on the memory; for example – the words "met", "bumped", "collided", "crashed", or "smashed" would all cause people to remember a car accident at different levels of intensity. The words "bumped", "hit", "grabbed", "smacked", or "groped" would all paint a different picture of a person in the memory of an observer of sexual harassment if questioned about it later. The stronger the word, the more intense the recreation of the experience in the memory is. This in turn could trigger further false memories to better fit the memory created.

Word lists

One can trigger false memories by presenting subjects a continuous list of words. When subjects were presented with a second version of the list and asked if the words had appeared on the previous list, they found that the subjects did not recognize the list correctly. When the words on the two lists were semantically related to each other, it was more likely that the subjects did not remember the first list correctly and created false memories.
In 1998, Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger III conducted a similar experiment. Their goal was to intentionally trigger false memories through word lists. They presented subjects with lists to study, all containing a large number of words that were semantically related to another word that was not found on the list. For example, if the word that they were trying to trigger was "river", the list would contain words such as flow, current, water, stream, bend, etc. They would then take the lists away and ask the subjects to recall the words on the lists. Almost every time, the false memory was triggered, and the subjects would end up recalling the target word as part of the list when it was never there. McDermott and Roediger even went as far as informing the subjects of the purpose and details of the experiment, and still the subjects would recall the non-listed target word as part of the word list they had studied.

Staged naturalistic events

Subjects were invited into an office and were told to wait there. After this, they had to recall the inventory of the visited office. Subjects recognized objects consistent with the "office schema", although they did not appear in the office.
In another study, subjects were presented with a situation where they witnessed a staged robbery. Half of the subjects witnessed the robbery live, while the other half watched a video of the robbery as it took place. After the event, they were seated and asked to recall what had happened during the robbery. The results showed that those who watched the video of the robbery recalled more information more accurately than those who were live on the scene. Still, false memory presented itself in ways such as subjects seeing things that would fit in a crime scene that were not there, or not recalling things that did not fit the crime scene. This happened with both parties, displaying the idea of staged naturalistic events.

Relational processing

Memory retrieval has been associated with the brain's relational processing. In associating two events, there are verbatim and gist representations. Verbatim matches to the individual occurrences and gist matches to general inferences. Keeping in line with the fuzzy-trace theory, which suggests false memories are stored in gist representations, Storbeck & Clore wanted to see how change in mood affected the retrieval of false memories. After using the measure of a word association tool called the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, the subjects' moods were manipulated. Moods were either oriented towards being more positive, more negative, or were left untouched. Findings suggested that a more negative mood made critical details, stored in gist representation, more accessible.

Mandela effect

Specific false memories can sometimes be shared by a large group of people. This phenomenon was dubbed the "Mandela effect" by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who reported having vivid and detailed memories of news coverage of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Broome reported that hundreds of other people had written about having the same memory of Mandela's death, some while he was still alive, and she speculated that the phenomenon could be evidence of parallel realities.
One well-documented example of shared false memories comes from a 2010 study that examined people familiar with the clock at Bologna Centrale railway station, which was damaged in a bombing in 1980, repaired shortly afterwards, and in 1996 stopped and permanently set to the time of the explosion, as a commemoration. In the study, 92% of respondents falsely remembered the clock as having been stopped since the bombing.
Other examples include:
Likewise, false memories of Mandela's death could be explained as the subject conflating him with Steve Biko, another prominent South African anti-apartheid activist, who died in prison in 1977.
Memes about the Mandela effect and associated online jokes about a time traveler altering the past and turning the current era into "a glitch" became popular in the United States in 2016.
Scientists suggest that these are examples of false memories shaped by similar cognitive factors affecting multiple people and families, such as social and cognitive reinforcement of incorrect memories or false news reports and misleading photographs that influence the formation of memories based on them.