Failures of Memory--Big and Small

By now, we all know that Brian Williams “misremembered” that a helicopter he was in was hit by enemy fire in Iraq twelve years ago. The video below shows how his account of the incident changed over the years. Since the memory was self-serving, many people have characterized Williams' account as a lie rather than an accidental memory lapse. To people who have never been in a war zone, the idea that someone might forget whether his helicopter was hit by gunfire is a pretty tough sell. NBC News implicitly took this position when it punished him by suspending him without pay for six months. Several other well-known people, such as Hillary Clinton, have been caught in similar fabrications, and several of Williams' other recollections have come under suspicion.

Cognitive psychologists point out that the average person dramatically underestimates the malleability of human memory. False memory syndrome refers to cases in which people have an important memory that they truly believe, but which is factually incorrect. Some people have been convicted of crimes they did not commit, such as sexual abuse of children, on the basis of memories “recovered” by alleged victims, usually with the aid of mental health practitioners. Other innocent defendants have been convicted of crimes to which they confessed under police interrogation, and of which they believed they were guilty, at least for a time. A new study by Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter provides some of the best evidence yet for the construction of detailed and important false memories.

The authors used a paradign developed by Elizabeth Loftus for her “lost in a shopping mall” study, in which some college students were induced to develop this false memory. After 126 Canadian students had volunteered to participate in the study, their parents or primary caregivers were interviewed. The purpose of the interview was to identify one highly emotional event of a non-criminal nature that had occurred to the students during their adolescence, and to ascertain that they had never been arrested and charged with a crime. The first 60 students who met these criteria participated in a series of three interviews, each about one week apart.

In the first interview, they were asked to recall and describe the true event and a false event allegedly reported by their parents. In half the cases, the false event was that they were arrested and charged with a crime—ten cases each of assault, assault with a weapon, and theft. The other thirty false events were non-criminal: an accidental injury, being attacked by a dog, and losing a large amount of money. Since none of the participants reported remembering the false event during the first interview, they were given false contextual cues, were asked to try to recover the memory, and were given advice as to how to recover it. They were asked again to describe both events and answer several questions about them during the second and third interviews. At the end of the third interview, they were fully debriefed.

Participants were said to have accepted the false memory if they met two criteria: (1) they reported ten or more details of the incident not suggested by the interviewer, and (2) they reported during the debriefing that they truly believed the event had occurred. Forty-four of sixty participants (73%) met these criteria. The percentages did not differ very much among the six types of false events.

The researchers were impressed not only by the large number of participants who accepted the false memory but also by their “richly detailed” descriptions of it. They compared responses to the true and false memories among the 44 participants who experienced the false memory. These students recalled more details of the true memory (92, on average) than the false memory (72)—but 72 details is still fairly impressive for a false memory. They had greater confidence in the true memory, and experienced it as more vivid, but the amount of anxiety generated by the true and false memories did not differ.

There are some important differences between Brian Williams' false memory and those created in the Shaw and Porter study. As far as we know, Williams' memory was not prompted by anyone else. However, Loftus has suggested that he might have been influenced by “audience tuning.” To paraphrase Jon Stewart, audience responses to his tale might have excited the pleasure centers in his brain and caused his story to drift toward greater bravery over time. In addition, the memories created in the study were not self-serving. Just the opposite. They remembered being charged with a crime. Would their misremembering have been even greater if the memory had been flattering to them?

Leslie Savan expressed her satisfaction that at least someone is being punished for lying about our invasion of Iraq, even if it's not one of the right people. Others have spoken about the relative unimportance of Brian Williams' battlefield exaggeration when compared to the many other lies he routinely told on behalf of the government and his corporate sponsors every weekday night. In fact, we might speculate that NBC's main reason for suspending him was not that he told a false story but his loss of credibility, which might adversely affect public acceptance of their nightly propaganda report.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman reports that he was in the Monroeville Mall last week when three people were shot, although he didn't see or hear the incident. When he posted his experience on Twitter, one person wryly commented, “in five years, he will say he was shot.”

By the way, did I ever tell you about the time I rescued a dog from a burning building?

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