You’d be surprised how many people remember a different ending to the movie “Big” with Tom Hanks.
Eyewitness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of evidence in criminal cases for the very reason described in the OP. And the longer the amount of time passes, the worse it gets.
Well, you can always tighten them up.
Someone should start a thread about that.
Some time in the early 90s, I witnessed an event that I knew a friend of mine would be interested in. Curiously enough, it involved false memory. The next morning, I wrote an email to my friend describing the event. A few years ago, on the 20th anniversary, my friend asked me to describe what had happened from memory. He had saved my original email; I hadn’t. What I wrote corresponded pretty closely to what I had written 20 years earlier. Less detail, of course, but nothing that contradicted what I had originally wrote.
Still, I have read enough of Elizabeth Loftus to know that it is certainly possible to induce false memories. I certainly knew that Mandela had emerged live from prison to lead his country.
Which is coincidentally the same ending as another movie that came out at about the same time. Someone should start a thread about that.
Here’s a simple one for you, that helps to illustrate the issues. You know what a penny looks like, right? You can picture one in your mind and everything.
So, what direction is Lincoln facing on the penny?
You probably can’t do any better than guess. Why is that? It’s because your memory isn’t actually an image that you’re retrieving. What you actually retain is a set of clues, from which you can reconstruct the memory each time you remember it. So, for instance, with a penny, what’s actually stored in your brain is something like “smallish brownish coin with a profile of a man with a beard”. You know what coins look like (though that’s its own set of associations, not an image, either), and you know what a beard looks like, and you know what a profile is, and you know what a man looks like (that last one, at least, isn’t a memory, but something hardwired into our brains: We’ve got a lot of built-in hardware dedicated to recognizing faces, which is why we’re so prone to seeing them in clouds and tortillas and the like). So, if you want to reconstruct an image of a penny, you mostly can… except you never bothered to remember which way the profile was facing, and so your mental image can’t include that detail.
There was an interesting study conducted immediately following the World Trade Center attack. Immediately after the attack researchers at NYU knew they had a unique opportunity to study this so they quickly made up a questionnaire and had 3000 people fill it out a week after the attack, and then the same people filled it out again 1 year and 3 years later. The questions were things like where were you when you heard about the attack, who told you, etc…
The long and the short of it is that the 3 year questionnaires contradicted the 1 week questionnaires on about 1/2 the details. However people were so certain about their memory that their response to being shown their original answers was more often, “I don’t know why I lied to you back then but that’s not what happened” than “I guess I misremembered.”
One of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent podcasts discusses this, or you can read a Scientific American article on the study HERE.
Most likely you are pulling from a real image, but you are cross referencing it with the wrong conversation.
Yes, that’s why people rarely get caught for counterfeiting pennies.
Is it weird I was rather sure Lincoln faces right? It just felt wrong the other way. It’s not that I haven’t experienced things like this where I can’t remember something basic, or, worse, remember it the wrong way, but this just isn’t one of them.