Social recall: factors that can affect false memory

The brain can be as creative as it is inaccurate when it comes to memory, working to turn made-up stories and childhood emotions into remembered fact

Chris French
The Guardian
March 29, 2016

The fallibility of human memory is one of the most well established findings in psychology. There have been thousands of demonstrations of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony under well-controlled conditions dating back to the very earliest years of the discipline. Relatively recently, it was discovered that some apparent memories are not just distorted memories of witnessed events: they are false memoriesfor events that simply never took place at all.

Psychologists have developed several reliable methods for implanting false memories in a sizeable proportion of experimental participants. It is only in the last few years, however, that scientists have begun to systematically investigate the phenomenon of non-believed memories. These are subjectively vivid memories of personal experiences that an individual once believed were accurate but now accepts are not based upon real events.

Prior to this, there were occasional anecdotal reports of non-believed memories. One of the most famous was provided by the influential developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. He had a clear memory of almost being kidnapped at about the age of two and of his brave nurse beating off the attacker. His grateful family were so impressed with the nurse that they gave her a watch as a reward. Years later, the nurse confessed that she had made the whole story up. Even after he no longer believed that the event had taken place, Piaget still retained his vivid and detailed memory of it.

The first systematic empirical investigation of non-believed memories was that reported by Giuliana Mazzoni, Alan Scoboria, and Lucy Harvey in 2010 . It found that one person in five reported such “memories” and that, in general, they had the same subjective characteristics as genuine memories, albeit that they tended to be more negative in emotional valence.Subsequent research has provided greater insight into non-believed memories. For example, it turns out that most of them are dated from mid-to-late childhood, suggesting that memories from this period are particularly susceptible to later revision.

Recently, artist AR Hopwood has compiled a fascinating collection of non-believed memories and published them as The False Memory Archive. He has used this collection to inspire a number of artworks supported by the Wellcome Trust. The examples in the archive, which range from relatively mundane to extremely bizarre, nicely illustrate some of the findings from the scientific studies, in particular the reasons people come to reject their once-believed “memories”.

Social recall

The most common reason people give for rejecting a memory is social feedback. This can take many forms but often it is simply a case of another person saying that the events in question either never happened or else happened very differently from the way they are remembered. Here are a couple of examples from the archive to illustrate this point:

“I was in a family member’s house in New York State during a summer holiday when I was a child. There was a tornado and I vividly remember seeing it approach from the window. We all hid in the basement. After asking my mother about it years on, she assured me this never happened.”

“I have always believed I was on a plane from Italy to Gatwick in 1968 at the age of 12 and the plane overshot the runway. I have very specific memories of getting off the plane via the emergency exit, shoes in hand. Other people who were on the same plane as me have told me it never happened, but I’ve gone as far as checking our newspaper reports from the date to see if it was real or not.”

Of course, it is always possible in some cases that the claimant does have an accurate memory and it is those around them who have either forgotten the event or else themselves have distorted memories. In many cases, however, there is independent evidence that proves conclusively that the memory must be false:

“I lived in London in 1961 with my sister. I was 21, she was 25. We returned to Australia after a year and occasionally reminisced about “the corner shop across the road”. Thirty years later my sister visited London. And found that the shop was actually a block away, on the equivalent corner. I was unconvinced, but visited myself 50 years after our first visit to find it was true. The shop was a block away, it was not “across the road”. It could not even be seen from the house we lived in.”

Fantasy v fact

Another common reason for rejecting an apparent memory is simply its implausibility.

“I have a very vivid memory, one of my favourites as a child, of being driven along in the back seat of my Dad’s car. I could see his head over the top of the seat, and we were going quite fast along winding country roads. He turned his head and told me I had to look after the car for a minute, as he had to pop out. He then proceeded to open the door, and his head disappeared as the door closed. I can clearly see him in my mind rolling along the grass verge and disappearing behind me as the car sped on. I sat, panicking, for what felt like minutes, until the door opened and he jumped back in – I can’t remember how he managed that part though.”

There are many examples in the archive of people reporting memories of either being able to fly or to breathe underwater:

“I can remember being able to fly as a small child. For years, in my teens I really struggled to accept that this wasn’t a real memory. I still have it with me today, memories of a number of separate occasions where I quite naturally flew rather than walked between two places.”

“I am convinced that I ‘remember’ being able to breathe underwater as a child, as long as I took tiny little breaths.”

A useful theoretical perspective for thinking about true memories, false memories and non-believed memories is referred to as theSource Monitoring Framework. Essentially, this refers to the psychological processes that allow us to identify the original source of mental representations. Sometimes we may remember things without correctly recalling where the information came from (eg thinking we directly witnessed an event when in fact we saw it in a film). One particular aspect of source monitoring, known as Reality Monitoring , focuses upon the processes involved in distinguishing between mental representations that were generated by external reality versus those that were generated internally (eg by dreams or imagination). One of the most reliable ways to generate false memories in psychology experiments is to simply get people to imagine events that never actually happened, a phenomenon known asimagination inflation.

This line of research not only provides insights into the nature of memory but also goes to the heart of our sense of identity itself. After all, that sense of identity is largely based upon our autobiographical memories of the events and experiences that have shaped us and made us into the people we are today. It is more than a little disconcerting to realise that some of our most prized experiences may never have actually happened at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/mar/29/social-recall-factors-that-can-affect-false-memory