The Mists of Memory

Many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.

- Elizabeth Loftus

When I was a teenager, I would go to Iowa in the summer to camp out with a bunch of my friends and work in the corn fields. We were detasseling corn, which involves pulling off the pollen-producing tassels so the corn crossbreeds the way farmers want. If you ever get a chance to detassel corn, by all means pass it up. It’s awful. You get up before dawn, put on a long-sleeved shirt and pants so the corn leaves don’t cut you (much), and then plunge into a dew-soaked cornfield. First you’re cold, then the sun gets hot enough to make your wet clothes steam. All the walking and dampness causes chafing, and you find yourself heading to town in search of diaper rash cream. It’s ugly. The first year I detasseled corn, I swore I would never do it again. 

And then I went back the next year. Why did I do this very silly thing? Because I remembered all the fun nights with friends in camp, and forgot the grueling days in the cornfields. I had fallen victim to a memory bias called rosy retrospection. Many of life’s experiences look a lot better in the rearview mirror. The truth is, the “good old days” weren’t necessarily that good. Many older Americans, for example, idealize the 1950’s. They remember those “Happy Days” as a time of innocence and prosperity, of sock hops, cheap gas, and milkshakes at the drive-in. They forget the Cold War fears of nuclear war, the ugly paranoia of the McCarthy hearings, and the intense racism and resulting desegregation battles. African-Americans remember the 1950’s much less fondly, and for good reason.

Our rose-tinted view of the past can be a problem. For one thing, it can make us forget what’s good about the the present, while pining for a mythical golden age that wasn’t actually that good. Rosy retrospection can also cause us to make the same mistakes again and again. If we forget the horrors of war, for example, we become more willing to fight new ones, and then we’re surprised all over again at how awful it is. This is compounded by nationalistic optimism that makes people think the next war will be an easy victory. When World War 1 broke out in the summer of 1914, people said it would be “over by Christmas”. It wasn’t.

Memory is much less reliable than most people realize, and not just because we see the past through rose-colored glasses. First, we can’t remember accurately what we didn’t perceive accurately in the first place, and we’ve seen how inaccurate perception can be. Second, memories can fade and become distorted over time. Third, memory can be influenced by suggestion. In a famous series of experiments, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed subjects videos of cars colliding. Then she asked some of them, “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” Others were asked the same question, with the word “smashed” changed to less vivid words like “hit”. The people who heard the word “smashed” reported that the cars were going faster before the accident. They were also more likely to think they saw glass breaking in the collision, even though there was no broken glass. A single word in a question actually changed their memories.

Obviously, this has big implications for the reliability of eyewitness testimony in court, and it gets a lot worse than misremembering fender-benders. People have been sent to prison for murder because witnesses wrongly thought they recognized them in a police lineup. Sometimes they only looked familiar because the witness had seen the suspect’s picture in the paper. People may even remember crimes that never happened at all: suspects subjected to intense police interrogations sometimes “remember” committing crimes they couldn’t have committed, and people in therapy sometimes experience “recovered memories” of childhood abuse or sexual trauma that never happened.

In these cases, the false memories develop when someone else asks them a series of leading questions. Poorly-trained therapists and detectives ask questions that assume what happened, instead of asking what happened. Therapists may ask, “Were you ever sexually abused?” instead of “Do you remember any childhood traumas?”. Well-trained therapists don’t ask such questions, because they don’t want to accidentally create false memories in the people they’re questioning. In fact, many psychologists suspect that most, if not all, repressed memories uncovered through therapy are actually false memories formed by therapy. Obviously, that doesn’t mean some people don’t have real memories of horrible trauma--it just means such memories are rarely if ever repressed in the first place. According to the American Psychological Association, actual repressed memories are very rare, and unfortunately can’t be distinguished from false memories without corroborating evidence. 

There are several other ways memory can fail us, but most aren’t as relevant to critical thinking as rosy retrospection and false (or distorted) memories. The key points to remember are: 1. Memory isn’t always accurate. 2. When we assume it is accurate, we can make mistakes with very serious consequences. Rosy retrospection can make us too eager to relive a past that wasn’t as good as we remember. Not knowing how memories can be distorted or even false can lead to wrongful convictions and ruined reputations. It can also lead us to think someone is lying, when they may be a victim of an imperfect memory--which is the same kind of memory most of us have.