False and Distorted Memories

Robert A. Nash, James Ost

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317566380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia cognitiva e cognizione

Our memories shape how we think about the past, how we plan for the future, and how we think about ourselves. Yet our memories are also constantly being reinvented: we often remember our experiences differently from how they truly happened, and can even remember experiences that never happened at all.

False and Distorted Memories provides an overview of recent and ongoing developments in the science of false memory. World-leading researchers unpick questions about flawed recollections, discussing issues as varied as the reliability of highly emotional memories, why we sometimes begin to remember fictional experiences that we have deliberately fabricated, and what happens when we stop believing our memories. Each chapter demonstrates how memory science has furthered our understanding of these important questions, by exploring theoretical ideas and psychological research methods that underpin their investigations.

Edited by Robert Nash and James Ost, this volume offers an international and up-to-date perspective on false and distorted memories. The volume also draws attention to the broad range of real-life contexts in which such distortions might arise and their potential consequences. False and Distorted Memories illustrates the ease with which memory can be contaminated and the power of the resulting memory errors, providing an integral text for researchers and students interested in the psychology of memory.

1
Introduction

False and distorted memories

Robert A. Nash and James Ost

Contrary to popular belief, how memory works isn’t always common sense. In a recent representative national survey of nearly 2,000 Americans, almost two-thirds (63 percent), endorsed the belief that human memory works like a video camera, accurately recording events so that these recordings can be reviewed at a later time. Almost half (48 percent) of respondents agreed that once a person forms a memory of an experience, the memory doesn’t change (Simons & Chabris, 2011). As we introduce these chapters, written by world experts on false and distorted memories, few readers will be surprised to learn that these commonly held beliefs about human memory are not well represented among these pages. Indeed, both beliefs are wildly at odds with those of memory scientists.

Unfortunately, there are many more studies showing that the general public’s understanding of memory is at odds with the scientific consensus. In one, more than one-third of a group of US participants, and more than half of South American participants, disagreed with the (scientifically robust) proposition that people can confuse events they imagined with events they actually experienced (Alvarez & Brown, 2002). And although many members of the public deny ideas about memory malleability that are accepted almost unanimously among the scientific community, many also accept bizarre and unscientific memory beliefs, such as the proposition that memories can be retrieved from as far back as birth (Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld, & Loftus, 2014) or, indeed, from before birth (Garry, Loftus, & Brown, 1994).

Why do so many people have an understanding about how memory works that conflicts strongly with the scientific consensus? Or, to frame this question differently, why have several decades of scientific research on the malleability of memory failed to satisfactorily reshape people’s understanding of how memory works? We propose three possible contributing factors.

Beliefs about memory stability can be deeply ingrained

One possibility is that our conceptions of memory are deep rooted, not only psychologically, but also socially and culturally. Consider the ways in which we routinely talk about remembering. Because we collectively tend to think of memory as a receptacle that fills with information over time, we ‘commit information to memory’ and store it in our ‘memory banks’, unless, of course, we have ‘a memory like a sieve.’ Because we tend to think of memory as a documentary record of the past, we retain important details by ‘taking a mental note’ of them, and later we ‘play them back.’ Various forms of these storage and inscription metaphors have existed for thousands of years, and perhaps because they are so enduring, they permeate academic psychology as well as folk psychology (Roediger, 1980). For example, despite strong objections to storage and inscription accounts of memory from pioneers such as Bartlett (1932) and other researchers (e.g., Susswein & Racine, 2009), the metaphor of memory as computerized data storage has been prominent among theoretical accounts of the mind since the 1950s (e.g., Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958; see also Costall, 1991).

Today’s neuroscience zeitgeist probably strengthens the popular conception of memories as concrete and measurable artifacts, localizable somewhere within brightly colored, pixelated maps of the brain. And it is perhaps unsurprising that people struggle to reconcile this neuroscientific framework with the notion of memory malleability. Indeed, if we accept that memories exist as physical representations etched into our brains, then it somehow seems inconceivable that those physical representations should morph and switch into different formats as fickly as a person might change their opinions (Nash, Wheeler, & Hope, 2015). Of course, we are not arguing or implying here that memory has nothing to do with the brain; quite the opposite. However, whereas a functioning brain is a necessary condition for memory, it is not a sufficient one (see Manier, 2004).

Over the most recent decades, despite the reign of neuroscience, psychological researchers have been gradually moving away from passive ‘storehouse’ metaphors of memory, towards an ever-stronger focus on the active, reflective, and strategic properties of remembering (i.e., metacognition; Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996). We use the word ‘remembering’ here quite deliberately, to endorse a view of memory as a process rather than as an entity (Blank, 2009). By treating remembering as a behavior that is individually and socially performed (e.g., Middleton & Edwards, 1990), rather than as a collection of inert messages that get inscribed upon or stored in the brain, we believe it becomes more self-evident that the events we recollect, and how we recollect them, should be shaped by social, motivational, and political forces that shift across times and contexts (Nash et al., 2015).

Beliefs about memory stability can be comforting

A second possibility is that people might continue to endorse the ‘rewind-and-replay’ video-recorder metaphor of memory for motivational reasons. That is to say, people may be deeply motivated to believe that their memories are stable and reliable over time, and to reject the notion that the events they recollect might have happened differently or never happened at all. This explanation seems plausible. Memories play a huge role in determining our personal identity; our sense of who we are is constructed from our recollections of how we have behaved in the past and what life experiences we have had (Wilson & Ross, 2003). To consider the possibility that these memories could be inaccurate or untrue, therefore, would seem to present a severe threat to our very identities.

It is well documented that people tend to avoid, deny, and trivialize information that conflicts with what they wish to be true (Kunda, 1990; Nickerson, 1998), and so it may be that people intentionally or unintentionally resist accepting scientific ideas about memory fallibility that present this kind of self-threat. By this token, people might fail to seek opportunities to reliably challenge and correct their faulty recollections (Wade, Nash, & Garry, 2014). Even when people do encounter evidence of inaccuracies in their own memories, they might be motivated to reject this evidence, as is illustrated in cases where siblings each insist that a childhood event happened to themselves and not to their brother or sister (Sheen, Kemp, & Rubin, 2001). Alternatively people might treat such incidents as rare hiccups, rather than as proof that their autobiographical memory system is fundamentally malleable.

In fact, although people may feel threatened by the idea of their self-defining memories being inaccurate, the irony is that by virtue of being malleable, our reconstructive memory systems in fact help to preserve and bolster our sense of positive self-regard. There is a well-supported perspective among scientists that memory distortions can fulfill self-preservation functions, for example, by altering certain negative memories in ways that seem better than objective reality, or by making our behaviors and attitudes seem more consistent over time than they actually have been (Newman & Lindsay, 2009).

Beliefs about memory stability can easily become personal

One final reason why people might maintain faulty beliefs about memory is a tendency to conflate concerns about the reliability of memory in general, with concerns about the truthfulness or mental state of specific people. To accept that human memories – even highly vivid and confident ones – are routinely inaccurate or false prompts us to consider real-life circumstances in which trusting or doubting a person’s recollection has sizeable consequences. Memory researchers have always been mindful of these real-world implications, perhaps most prominently in legal contexts (e.g., Münsterberg, 1908). Indeed, many have fiercely debated whether or not psychologists have any rightful place in the courtroom as ‘experts’, to educate juries and judges about the foibles of memory (e.g., McCloskey & Egeth, 1983).

What this point demonstrates is that members of the public are rarely prompted to question their beliefs about memory as part of a mere philosophical exercise within a contextual vacuum. Instead, questions about the reliability of memory almost always arise in the context of some specific real-world scenario. Could our confident and compelling witness possibly be misremembering what happened? Is this politician, whose detailed story is clearly contradicted by documentary evidence, necessarily lying? As a result, public conversations about how memory works easily become conversations about whether to trust or distrust particular individuals or groups of individuals. Indeed, because memory science teaches us about effects that typically or often occur rather than universal laws, this means that robust memory science can provide reason to doubt testimonies that are, in fact, wholly genuine. These conversations therefore raise sociopolitical and moral contentions that add substantial texture to the cold, theoretical, scientific issues at hand.

This point has been no more clearly illustrated than by the ‘memory wars’: an intensely heated and controversial discourse that erupted in North America during the 1990s concerning the reliability of memories of sexual abuse and trauma. Two key sets of events precipitated these debates. First, concern was raised about high-profile cases in which children had made allegations of sexual abuse following highly suggestive interviews (Ceci & Bruck, 1995). Second, many adults were at that time filing court suits against their own parents, whom they were alleging had sexually abused them as children. The cases that raised particular concern were those in which the abuse memories had allegedly been ‘recovered’ during therapy, following a period of complete non-awareness of the events in question (Loftus, 1993). In the debates that ensued, theoretical questions about how memory works were under sharp scrutiny, not only by academics, but also by members of law enforcement, lawyers, therapists, social workers, the mass media, and the general public. Can traumatic memories be repressed in our subconscious minds? What are the effects on memory of being told to ‘forget’ that something happened? Are young children able to provide reliable memory accounts? Can people develop rich false memories of personal and disturbing events that never truly occurred? Do ‘memory recovery techniques’ affect the reliability of recall? These questions and many more were debated in scientific and popular writings in ways that sparked outrage, controversy, and, at points, resembled “a religious war” (Pezdek & Banks, 1996, p. xii).

As in the ‘memory wars’ and numerous other real-life scenarios, public conversations about the malleability of memory in general have often been conflated with disputes about the credibility of individual accusers, victims, and witnesses. In fact, for some people the term ‘false memory’ (as contrasted with similar terms such as ‘memory errors’) necessarily concerns doubts about the credibility of abuse allegations (see e.g., DePrince, Allard, Oh, & Freyd, 2004). Whereas there is no doubting that the term ‘false memory’ has come to greater public prominence within the context of these kinds of debates, this does not (and should not) mean that the term false memory is necessarily one that exclusively connotes skepticism toward abuse claims. Rather, false memories occur in all aspects of everyday life and have meaning and consequences in innumerable ways, positive and negative, minor and major. We therefore believe that it is important to decouple the rigid association held by some between the term ‘false memory’ on the one hand and skepticism of certain abuse claims on the other hand. This association, we believe, has at times derailed and diverted public conversations about human memory and its general capacity to trick, deceive, persuade, and misinform.

To summarise, because inaccurate beliefs about memory are deeply ingrained, because they are comforting, and because they can easily become personal, memory scientists have a large task on their hands correcting these beliefs. In doing so, false-memory researchers face some distinct ethical challenges. To start, creating false memories often involves deceiving participants, for example by providing false suggestions, or elaborate cover studies about our studies’ aims. The necessity for such deception is self-evident, but we must always balance this necessity against the need to assure participants’ wellbeing and rights, and we must offer strong scientific arguments for the use of such deception (i.e., to independent ethical review committees) and ensure that we prevent any negative outcomes for participants. Moreover, the specific false memories that we attempt to create also require careful ethical consideration – it would be unacceptable, for example, to attempt to plant false memories that might traumatise participants, or damage their real-world social relationships. The importance of this point is all the greater in light of recent work, which shows people’s false memories can persist even after the participant ceases believing them (see Chapter 8 in this volume). Like all research involving human participants, participants in false-memory research must also be fully debriefed. In this case they need to be informed about any deception that has occurred (and why it was necessary), and disavowed of their belief in any suggested events. They also need to be educated about the fact that having false memories is normal, rather than in any way pathological. Finally, although no scientist can fully control how their findings are represented and used by other scientists, the popular press, or the general public, we nevertheless have an overriding ethical duty to report our findings honestly and responsibly, and to avoid sensationalistic or far-reaching claims that our data cannot support. The various research programmes outlined in this volume cover topics that are cutting-edge, pertinent to major societal issues, and often controversial. Yet for all of the scientists who have contributed to this volume, ethical considerations such as those we have described are fundamental to how they conduct their work, and to how collectively we build upon the science of false and distorted memories.

Overview of this volume

This volume opens with chapters concerning two of the most well-researched and contentious questions in the false memory literatures: Are traumatic and emotionally negative memories immune from distortion? Are children’s memories less accurate than adults’? Although both of these questions represented key battlegrounds during the ‘memory wars’, they also have much wider implications. In Chapter 2, Oulton and Takarangi tackle the first of these questions, providing diverse evidence that memories that contain extreme, visceral emotion cannot by that fact alone be guaranteed as reliable. The authors review our current understanding of factors that contribute to the reliability or unreliability of emotional memories, and in doing so they challenge widespread conceptions that emotional and nonemotional memories operate in distinct ways. In Chapter 3, Otgaar and colleagues turn our attention to children’s memories. They provide an overview of some key methods by which researchers have studied the malleability of children’s memories and some theoretical perspectives that have guided their understanding of developmental trajectories in susceptibility to memory distortion. Their chapter then outlines several important factors that determine the likelihood of false memory development among children. Their findings lead us to reevaluate the common assumption that children have less accurate memories than do adults.

In the subsequent section of this volume, our contributors focus on some of the myriad possible sources of false memories. In Chapter 4, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: false and distorted memories
• 2 (Mis)remembering negative emotional experiences
• 3 When children are the worst and best eyewitnesses: factors behind the development of false memory
• 4 Photos and memory
• 5 The past is a social construction: susceptibility to social influence in (mis)remembering
• 6 Forced fabrication and false eyewitness memories
• 7 Stories and movies can mislead: why Biloxi (Mississippi) sometimes relocates to Tennessee after reading The Great Gatsby
• 8 Cognitive fluency and false memories
• 9 Nonbelieved memories: a review of findings and theoretical implications
• 10 The positive side of memory illusions: new findings about how false memories facilitate reasoning and problem solving
• 11 False memories matter: the repercussions that follow the development of false memory
• 12 Concluding remarks: malleable knowledge about malleable memories
• Index