The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (11 page)

The only problem with the story was that it had actually happened not to Ken, but to Chris. Ken had heard Chris tell the story some time before and had incorporated it into his own memory. In fact, Ken felt so strongly that the memory was his, and had so completely forgotten that Chris was the original raconteur, that even Chris’s presence when Ken retold the story did not jog his memory of the way in which he had actually “encountered” Captain Picard. But when Chris pointed out the error, Ken quickly realized that this memory was not his own. This anecdote illustrates another aspect of the illusion of memory: When we retrieve a memory, we can falsely believe that we are fetching a record of something that happened to us rather than someone else.

Although we believe that our memories contain precise accounts of what we see and hear, in reality these records can be remarkably scanty. What we retrieve often is filled in based on gist, inference, and other influences; it is more like an improvised riff on a familiar melody than a digital recording of an original performance. We mistakenly believe
that our memories are accurate and precise, and we cannot readily separate those aspects of our memory that accurately reflect what happened from those that were introduced later. That’s how Ken appropriated Chris’s story—he had a vivid memory for the event, but mistakenly attributed it to his own experience. In the scientific literature, this type of distortion is known as a
failure of source memory
. He forgot the source of his memory, but because it was so vivid, he assumed that it came from his own experience.

Source memory failures contribute to many cases of unintentional plagiarism. In the classes we teach, we occasionally encounter intentional plagiarism (or a gross misunderstanding of the right way to do research) when a student copies sections of a paper from Wikipedia or other sources. Unintentional plagiarism refers to cases in which people are convinced that an idea was their own when they actually learned about it from someone else. Recently, bestselling spiritual author Neale Donald Walsch was caught plagiarizing a story originally written by Candy Chand that had circulated on spirituality websites and blogs for more than a decade.
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The story describes a group of students who were using placards to spell out “Christmas Love” in a winter pageant rehearsal. One student accidentally held her letter “m” upside down, resulting in the phrase “Christ was Love.” Walsch posted the story to Beliefnet.com in December 2008 as if it had happened to his son Nicholas. But it actually happened to Chand’s son, who also is named Nicholas, twenty years earlier—before Walsch’s son was even born. In this case, it is clear that Walsch appropriated someone else’s story. The question, though, is whether he was plagiarizing intentionally or whether he merely misappropriated the memory. In acknowledging a “serious error,” Walsch stated:

This case bears all the hallmarks of a failure of source memory. Walsch remembered the story, having read and retold it many times. The fact that the child in the story had the same name as his son made it easier for him to come to believe that the memory was his. (Our friend Ken Norman probably picked up Chris’s story more readily because he had dined at the same Legal Sea Food restaurant.) Walsch kept a record of the story in his file and came to believe that he had written it. In his interview with the
New York Times
, Walsch said, “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.” Chand, however, thinks the theft was intentional: “If he knew this was wrong, he should have known it was wrong before he got caught … quite frankly, I’m not buying it.” Both Chand’s indignation and Walsch’s astonishment are entirely consistent with the illusion of memory. Walsch doesn’t understand how he could have mistakenly appropriated another person’s memory, and Chand doesn’t believe that he could have done so innocently. They both think that memory must be more faithful to experience than it really is.

Just as we cannot be certain that Kenny Conley suffered from inattentional blindness when he reported not seeing Michael Cox being beaten, we cannot say for certain whether Walsch’s plagiarism was intentional or accidental. What we can say, though, is that it is possible that Walsch internalized someone else’s memory and lost track of the source of the story. Such source memory failures are common, and they even can be created in the laboratory. In a clever study, psychologists Kimberly Wade, Maryanne Garry, Don Read, and Stephen Lindsay asked subjects to view a doctored photograph showing the subject enjoying a hot air balloon ride as a child.
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The subjects were each interviewed several times, and were asked each time to recall the event, or if they could not recall it, to imagine that it
had
happened to themselves. Although none of the subjects had ever taken a hot air balloon ride, the photograph and attempts to recall it led some of them to incorporate information about the
image into their personal narrative memories. Half the subjects created a false memory about the balloon ride, some embellishing their memories substantially beyond what was shown in the photograph.

The ability to change memories using doctored photographs has Orwellian ramifications. If we can induce false memories simply by editing images, it might be possible to literally revise history, changing the past by doctoring it. Using a similar approach, Dario Sacchi, Franca Agnoli, and Elizabeth Loftus showed subjects an edited version of the famous photograph of a single person standing in front of a column of tanks during the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
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In the original version of the photograph, only the lone protester was visible on the wide road. The doctored version shows crowds of people lining a narrower road on both sides of the tanks. When they were quizzed about the historical facts of Tiananmen Square only moments later, those who viewed the doctored photograph believed that far more people had been at the protest.

Memory distortions are not limited to irrelevant details like whether or not books were in an office or particular words were part of a list. In fact, they can apply to life-and-death decisions, even those that you yourself have made. Australian psychologist Stefanie Sharman and her colleagues conducted an experiment that calls to mind the classic
Seinfeld
episode in which Kramer asks Elaine to help him and his lawyer work through a long list to decide the medical circumstances under which he would be willing to carry on living. (Lawyer: “OK. One lung, blind and you’re eating through a tube.” Kramer: “Naw, that’s not my style.” Elaine: “Borrrr-ing.”) The researchers interviewed adults and asked them to make (more realistic) decisions about which life-sustaining treatments they’d want if they were seriously ill.
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For example, would they want only CPR performed, or would they also want to be fed artificially if necessary? They interviewed the same people twelve months later using the same questions.

Overall, 23 percent of all their decisions changed between the initial interview and the follow-up, meaning that people who said during the first interview that they would want a life-extending treatment said during the second interview that they wouldn’t want it (or vice versa). That people would change their preferences is not terribly surprising. Perhaps they had discussed the possibilities with friends, relatives, or doctors in the interim; maybe they encountered news stories about end-of-life issues. What is striking is that 75 percent of the people who changed their minds were unaware that they had done so! They thought that the decision they reported in the second interview was the same as their decision in the first interview. Their memory for what they had said earlier was rewritten to match their current beliefs.

The illusion of memory leads us to assume—unless we receive direct evidence to the contrary—that our memories, beliefs, and actions are mutually consistent and stable over time. Amid the national grief after President Kennedy was assassinated, a poll showed that two-thirds of people claimed they had voted for him in the 50/50 squeaker election of 1960.
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At least some of them must have revised their memories of how they voted three years earlier, probably to make them consistent with the positive feelings they had about their fallen leader. More broadly, we tend to assume that everything in our world is stable and unchanging unless something draws our attention to a discrepancy. When our beliefs change, though, our memories can change along with them. A living will you produced a few years ago may not reflect your current preferences—but you are likely to misremember its contents and assume that it expresses what you want today. If you become seriously ill and are unable to communicate, doctors will rely on this document and may inadvertently take actions that contradict your wishes.

Try to recall exactly where you were when you first heard about the attacks of September 11, 2001. If you’re like us, you have a vivid memory of how you learned about the attacks, where you were, who else was
with you, what you were doing immediately beforehand, and what you did immediately afterward. Chris recalls waking up late that morning, after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center. He listened to the
Howard Stern Show
on the radio until it ended around noon, at which point he turned on the TV. He got in touch with an Israeli colleague, who told him it was already obvious who the perpetrators must be, and he received an e-mail update from a friend who was living in Brooklyn, watching the events safely from her rooftop. He received another e-mail from the manager of his office building at Harvard, William James Hall, recommending evacuation.

Dan recalls working in his office that morning when his graduate student Stephen Mitroff came in to tell him that a plane hit the first tower. He spent the next few minutes seeking information online, and when the second plane hit, he turned on the television in his lab and he and his three graduate students watched the towers collapse. He then spent a few frantic minutes on the phone trying to reach his brother David’s girlfriend because David was traveling back from New York to Boston that morning (he was sitting on a plane waiting to take off from LaGuardia Airport when the attacks happened). Dan remembers becoming concerned that the fifteen-story building he was in might also be a target. He left before noon to pick up his wife in downtown Boston and they went home together and watched the television coverage for the rest of the day.

Neither of us has any idea what we were doing or whom we talked to the day before 9/11. We suspect that the same is true for you. Your memories of 9/11 are more vivid, detailed, and emotional than your memories of more ordinary events from that time period. Memories of dramatic events of personal or national importance often are recalled in greater detail. Some significant events appear to be imprinted in our minds in a way that lets us play them back in video-like detail, perfectly preserved despite the passage of time. This intuition is powerful and pervasive. It is also wrong.

Such detailed memories for a significant event were first studied systematically in 1899 by Frederick Colgrove as part of his doctoral
research at Clark University. Colgrove asked 179 middle-aged and older adults where they were when they heard about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
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Even though he asked people to recall events that happened more than thirty years earlier, 70 percent remembered where they were and how they heard about it, and some provided exceptional amounts of detail.

Nearly eighty years later, social psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term
flashbulb memories
to characterize these vivid, detailed memories for surprising and important events.
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The name, by analogy to photography, reflects the idea that the details surrounding surprising and emotionally significant events are preserved in the instant they occur: Events meriting permanent storage are imprinted in the brain just as a scene is imprinted onto film. According to Brown and Kulik, the memory is “very like a photograph that indiscriminately preserves the scene in which each of us found himself when the flashbulb was fired.”

In their study, Brown and Kulik surveyed eighty Americans (forty black and forty white) about a variety of events, most of which involved assassinations or attempted assassinations in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Much as Colgrove did before them, Brown and Kulik documented that all but one of their subjects had a flashbulb memory for the Kennedy assassination. Majorities had flashbulb memories for the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and many had flashbulb memories for other similar events.

In their research papers, Colgrove and Brown and Kulik provided vivid examples from their own memories to go along with the detailed, emotionally charged recollections their subjects had for these political assassinations. We all have such flashbulb experiences, and we can retrieve them with ease and fluency. Recounting or asking about a flashbulb memory can start a conversation that goes on for hours; try it the next time you’re at a boring dinner party. It is the richness of these particular recollected experiences that leads us to believe so strongly in their accuracy. Ironically, the conclusions drawn from the initial research on flashbulb memories were based entirely on the illusion of
memory. The recollections of their subjects were so vivid and detailed that the researchers assumed they must be accurate.