The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (13 page)

Talarico and Rubin did one more clever thing. They asked the students to rate how strongly they believed in the accuracy of their own memories. For the everyday memory, people had a good sense of how accurate they were: As their memories got worse, they were less confident in them. That is, they did
not
suffer from the illusion of memory for everyday events. Just as people know that memory for arbitrary facts is fallible, they know that they forget otherwise trivial details about their experiences. When they cannot recollect the details well, they become less trusting of their memories.

The flashbulb memories showed an entirely different pattern, though. Subjects continued to believe strongly in the accuracy of their memories even though their memories became less accurate over time. The illusion of memory—the difference between how accurate our memories are and how accurate we think they are—operates at maximum strength for flashbulb memories. Early writing on flashbulb memories suggested that they were created by the activation of a special “print now” mechanism in the brain. In light of Talarico and Rubin’s findings, it may be better to think of this mechanism as saying instead “believe now.”

In many cases, memory distortions and embellishments are minor matters, but in some contexts they have tremendous consequences, precisely because of the illusion of memory. When people are subject to the illusion of memory, they impugn the intentions and motivations of those who are innocently misremembering. The power of this illusion was revealed in a crucial incident in the 2008 presidential campaign. Running against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton repeatedly emphasized her greater experience in international affairs. In a speech at George Washington University, she described a
particularly harrowing March 1996 mission to Tuzla, Bosnia: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” Unfortunately for Clinton, the
Washington Post
looked into her story and published a photograph showing not a dash for cover but … a greeting ceremony, featuring the then First Lady kissing a Bosnian child who had just read a welcoming poem. Out of one hundred contemporary news reports of the event, none even mentioned a security threat. Several news videos also surfaced, all showing a calm stroll from the plane to an uneventful ceremony on the tarmac.

A commenter on the
Post’s
website responded to the fact-checking article: “There are only three ways to explain Clinton’s story here: (a) she is a bald-faced liar; (b) her perception of reality is utterly skewed; or (c) her memory is utterly demented.” Political commentator Peggy Noonan wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
that “we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren’t, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought…. It was as if she’d watched the movie
Wag the Dog
, with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration.” A cover of the
New Republic
depicted a bug-eyed Clinton hearing “voices in her head” and ranting that she offered to sacrifice her own life to protect her traveling companions in Bosnia (“And I said to Sinbad, ‘Leave me, save yourself!’”). This is the typical response of the human mind to another person’s false memory, especially an arguably self-serving memory like Clinton’s grace-under-fire brush with death. Even Bill Clinton later proffered commonsense excuses for his wife’s memory lapse, claiming (incorrectly) that she made the comments late at night and pointing out (correctly but perhaps unhelpfully) that she was sixty years old.

An entirely plausible alternative explanation for Clinton’s fictitious snipers is that, like all fallible human minds, hers automatically and unconsciously reconstructed the landing in Tuzla to be consistent with the image of herself that she was convinced was accurate. Like Neil
Reed’s memory of being reprimanded by Bobby Knight, Clinton’s memory of arriving in Bosnia was systematically distorted to become consistent with her internalized, personal narrative. Like Reed, and the students whose flashbulb memories of the
Challenger
explosion proved inaccurate, Clinton could easily have had full confidence in the accuracy of her memory. And, as in Reed’s case, videos revealed the truth. Hillary Clinton’s distorted memory contributed to her loss of the presidential nomination by helping to revivify the popular impression, fair or not, that she would say anything to get elected (an impression that was compounded by her initial refusal to acknowledge the error after the videos surfaced).
⁴³

Is it possible to distinguish calculated deception from accidental distortion? We noted earlier that the illusion of memory does not apply equally to all memories. We are more aware of the limits on our ability to remember arbitrary facts and details, and we do not expect others to remember such details. We do not expect people to be able to remember random fifteen-digit numbers, although even for digit memory, people do overestimate their own ability to remember. It turns out that more than 40 percent of respondents to a survey thought they could remember ten random digits, even though less than 1 percent of people can actually do this when they are tested.
⁴⁴
However, the illusion of memory is more powerful when we remember personally relevant information or experiences. The critical factor driving the illusion seems to be the extent to which a memory triggers a strong recollective experience. In other words, if you recall
how
you experienced and learned something rather than merely
what
you experienced and learned, you are far more likely to trust the veracity of your memory. Just as the vividness of our visual perception makes us think we are paying attention to more than we are, our experience of fluent, vivid recollection fuels the illusion of memory. When we recall a set of arbitrary digits or facts, we do not have a strong recollective experience. When we recall how we learned about the 9/11 attacks, we do. That is why Hillary Clinton and Neil Reed held firm to what they remembered—they had distinct and powerful recollections of what happened, and the vividness of their memories led them to believe them more strongly.
⁴⁵

The vividness of our recollections is tied to how they affect us emotionally. For most people, lists of numbers do not inspire fear or sadness, but thoughts of 9/11 do. And these emotions affect how we
think
we remember, even if they do not affect how much we
actually
remember. Subjects in an experiment were asked to view either emotionally neutral photographs, such as a farm scene, or strongly arousing and negative images, such as a gun pointed right at the camera.
⁴⁶
Later, when asked to decide whether they had seen these images before, they had stronger recollective experiences for the emotional pictures than the neutral ones. Emotional memories, like the ones we have for 9/11, are more likely to induce strong, vivid recall—regardless of whether they are accurate. Beware of memories accompanied by strong emotions and vivid details—they are just as likely to be wrong as mundane memories, but you’re far less likely to realize it.

Unfortunately, people regularly use vividness and emotionality as an indicator of accuracy; they use these cues to assess how confident they are in a memory. Critically, people also judge the accuracy of
another person’s
memory based on how much confidence that person expresses in the memory. As we will see in the next chapter, the tendency to assume that confidently recalled memories are accurate ones illustrates another cognitive illusion: the illusion of confidence.

O
NE SUMMER DAY
when he was in graduate school, Chris woke up with a headache. This wasn’t unusual—he has always been prone to headaches. Later that day the aches spread to the rest of his body, and he began to feel exhausted and apathetic. It was a chore to get up from bed, walk into the living room of his apartment, sit down, and turn on the TV. His whole body hurt when he tried to stand up. Simple tasks like taking a shower left him breathless. The symptoms suggested a bad flu, but strangely he had no respiratory symptoms, and July is not exactly the height of flu season. After feeling awful for a few days, Chris went to Harvard’s health service. The nurse who saw him concluded that it probably was a virus and told him to rest and stay hydrated.

The next day, a Sunday, his symptoms unchanged, Chris took one of those enervating showers. Moving slowly to conserve energy, he turned to let the water hit the back of his legs, and just when it did he felt a sharp pain. Twisting his neck and looking down, he saw a huge red rash
that looked like a sunburst, right in the middle of his left calf. It was much larger than any mosquito bite he’d ever seen. Armed with a new symptom, he went into the after-hours care department and proudly displayed the rash. The doctor on duty asked Chris whether he’d been bitten by a tick recently. At first Chris was inclined to say no, since he’d never even seen a tick in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. But then he remembered that he’d visited his parents in Armonk, a suburb of New York City, a couple of weeks earlier, and had spent time with his mother in her vegetable garden. There were plenty of ticks there. The doctor showed Chris a picture from a medical book that illustrated the characteristic skin rash produced from infection by
Borrelia burgdorferi
, the tick-borne bacteria that cause Lyme disease. It looked exactly like Chris’s calf.
¹

If Lyme disease isn’t diagnosed early, it becomes more difficult to treat and has the potential to cause chronic disability. After the doctor explained the diagnosis, she excused herself from the room. She returned moments later with another book, in which she looked up the treatment for acute Lyme disease. She wrote a prescription for twenty-one days of the antibiotic doxycycline and handed it to Chris.

Chris was a little unnerved by this experience. First, the diagnosis itself seemed ominous. But more unsettling was the doctor’s open consultation of reference books during the session. Chris had never seen a doctor do this before, and this one did it twice. Did she know what she was doing? In the northeastern United States, where Lyme disease is prevalent, how could an urgent-care doctor not be familiar with its diagnosis and treatment? Chris went straight to the drugstore to fill the prescription, but he couldn’t help feeling uneasy about the doctor’s uncertainty.

If you encountered a doctor who had to look up the diagnostic criteria and recommended treatment for your condition, wouldn’t you wonder too? To do so would only be natural: We all tend to think of a confident doctor as a competent one and an uncertain doctor as a potential malpractice suit. We treat confidence as an honest signal of a person’s professional skill, accurate memory, or expert knowledge. But
as you’ll see in this chapter, the confidence that people project, whether they are diagnosing a patient, making decisions about foreign policy, or testifying in court, is all too often an illusion.

To understand this illusion of confidence, we will begin in an unlikely place: the ballroom of the Adams Mark Hotel in Philadelphia, longtime site of the aptly named World Open, one of the largest annual open chess tournaments in the world. Anyone who pays the entry fee, from novice to grandmaster, can play. In 2008, more than fourteen hundred players competed for over $300,000 in prize money. The scene is not necessarily what you’d expect. For one thing, silence does not reign; there is a constant patter of chess pieces clicking against other pieces and buttons on chess clocks being slapped as players make their moves. Outside the playing rooms, it’s even noisier. Players chatter about the games they just finished, the games they’re about to play, and even about the games they’re playing at that moment. (The rules permit general conversation about your game, as long as you don’t solicit or receive advice from anyone.) The players themselves aren’t all like the geeky, dateless high school chess team members you remember. Nor are they all bearded, pensive old men. Some could definitely use a shower or a makeover, but most are normal-looking children, parents, lawyers, doctors, engineers; there are also professional chess players, many from foreign countries. One stereotype does hold true, though: There is a distinct absence of women. Fewer than 5 percent of tournament chess players are female.

The strangest thing about the players in this tournament—indeed, about the players in every chess tournament—is that they know precisely how good they are at chess compared with the other players. This is not true of most activities in life, or even of most competitive endeavors. There is no master ranking scale to tell you how you compare in skill with other drivers, business managers, teachers, or parents. Even professions like law and medicine have no clear way of determining
who is best. This lack of a clear measure of ability makes it easy to get an inflated sense of your own skill. But chess has a mathematically objective, public rating system that provides up-to-date, accurate, and precise numerical information about a player’s “strength” (chess jargon for ability) relative to other players. All tournament players know that if you win a tournament game, your rating goes up, and if you lose a game, your rating goes down. Battling a higher-rated player to a draw also raises your rating, while drawing with a lower-rated player reduces it. Ratings are public knowledge and are printed next to each player’s name on tournament scoreboards; many players ask their opponent “What’s your rating?” before beginning a game. Ratings are valued so highly that chess players will remember their opponents better by their ratings than by their names or faces. “I beat a 1726” or “I lost to a 1455” are not uncommon things to hear in the hallway outside the playing room.