The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
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Nearly eighty years later, social psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term flashbulb memories to characterize these vivid, detailed memories for surprising and important events.35 The name, by analogy to photography, reflects the idea that the details surrounding surprising and emotionally significant events are preserved in the instant they occur: Events meriting permanent storage are imprinted in the brain just as a scene is imprinted onto film. According to Brown and Kulik, the memory is “very like a photograph that indiscriminately preserves the scene in which each of us found himself when the flashbulb was fired.”
In their study, Brown and Kulik surveyed eighty Americans (forty black and forty white) about a variety of events, most of which involved assassinations or attempted assassinations in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Much as Colgrove did before them, Brown and Kulik documented that all but one of their subjects had a flashbulb memory for the Kennedy assassination. Majorities had flashbulb memories for the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and many had flashbulb memories for other similar events.
In their research papers, Colgrove and Brown and Kulik provided vivid examples from their own memories to go along with the detailed, emotionally charged recollections their subjects had for these political assassinations. We all have such flashbulb experiences, and we can retrieve them with ease and fluency. Recounting or asking about a flashbulb memory can start a conversation that goes on for hours; try it the next time you’re at a boring dinner party. It is the richness of these particular recollected experiences that leads us to believe so strongly in their accuracy. Ironically, the conclusions drawn from the initial research on flashbulb memories were based entirely on the illusion of memory. The recollections of their subjects were so vivid and detailed that the researchers assumed they must be accurate.
After writing down his personal recollection of 9/11 for this book, Dan e-mailed his former students and asked them to send him their own for comparison. The first to respond was Stephen Mitroff, now a professor at Duke University:
I got an email from my girlfriend saying a plane hit the World Trade Center. I did a quick look at CNN and then went into your office where you and Michael Silverman were chatting. I told you. We went back to my office and we were looking at the images on Steve Franconeri’s computer. You surmised it must have been a small plane and the pilot lost control. We saw a picture of a huge commercial plane right next to the tower and you thought it must be a Photoshopped pic. We looked at various websites, including airline sites to look at the status updates of the flights that were being reported as hijacked. After more web searching, you hooked up the TV in our testing room and lots of people watched more in there. I think we witnessed one of the towers collapse, but I am not confident in that. We definitely were watching during one of the key events. We all started to feel an unwarranted uneasiness over being in the tallest building in town and left before lunch time. Michael and I walked back to Boston …
Dan’s other two graduate students at the time both reported being away from the lab that morning, so they could not have followed the news reports with Dan. Mitroff remembered Michael Silverman—Dan’s postdoctoral fellow at the time, now a professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine—being in Dan’s office but Dan did not. Dan e-mailed Silverman the same question he had asked the three Steves. The following report came back:
I was standing in your office discussing something with you. The radio on your bookshelf was on. Mitroff yelled from his office something to the extent that CNN was reporting that a plane just flew into the World Trade Center. I went to his office to see but the page was loading very slowly. I mentioned that little planes fly the Hudson corridor regularly, so I guessed it was possible. The page loaded and it showed a large plane flying toward the WTC. I said something to the extent that putting up a Photoshopped image like that was disgusting—I was still convinced that only a small plane had crashed. The next information we received came from your radio (CNN was slow and not loading anything additional). We heard that not one but two planes had hit. I then went to my office and tried to call my wife. She was also trying to call me. Neither of us could get through…. When I left my office, someone had turned on a television in the testing room. The picture was noisy. It showed that one tower had already dropped and we watched the second one fall. (I’m not sure if the second tower falling was live, but I suspect it wasn’t.) You made the decision for us to leave and go home around 11:00. Mitroff and I walked to his apartment and then I walked home.
There are interesting similarities and differences among these accounts. First the similarities: Everyone agrees that Dan heard about the attack from Steve Mitroff, they spent some time searching online for information, and then Dan turned on the television in the lab where he and Mitroff watched footage of a tower collapsing. Now for the differences: Dan did not recall Michael Silverman being present and he mistakenly remembered his other graduate students being there. All three remember Mitroff coming into Dan’s office, but Silverman remembers Mitroff yelling from his office first. Dan recalled nothing about a discussion of the image of a plane next to the tower; Mitroff recalled Dan commenting that the plane was small and that the image of a larger plane was edited; and Silverman recalls making those comments himself.
Three cognitive psychologists had vivid memories for what they experienced on 9/11, but their memories conflicted in several ways. If memory worked like a video recording, all three reports about 9/11 would be identical. In fact, there is no way to verify which of the accounts is most accurate. The best we can do is to assume that two independent and mutually consistent recollections are more likely to be correct than one recollection that conflicts with both. Many cases of memory failure are just like this, in that there is no documentary evidence to establish the ground truth of what actually happened.
In some cases, like Neil Reed’s confrontation with Bobby Knight, it is possible to compare people’s recollections to documentary evidence of what actually happened. President George W. Bush experienced a similar distortion to his memory of how he first learned about the attacks on the morning of 9/11. You might recall the video footage of Bush reading the story “The Pet Goat” to an elementary school class in Florida when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, walked in and whispered in his ear. His stunned reaction provided fodder for comics and commentators alike. That moment, caught on video, was how he heard about the plane hitting the second tower. It was his moment of realization that the United States was under attack. He’d already heard about the first plane before entering the classroom, but like many in the media, he believed that crash to have been a small aircraft accidentally veering into the tower.
On at least two occasions, Bush publicly recalled having seen the first plane hit the tower on television before entering the classroom. For example, on December 4, 2001, in response to a question from a young boy, he recalled, “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I use[d] to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ And I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’” The problem is that the only video footage broadcast the day of the attacks was of the second plane. There was no video footage of the first plane’s impact available until long afterward.36 Bush’s memory, although plausible, could not have been right. He correctly recalled Andrew Card entering the classroom following the crash of the second plane and telling him that America was under attack, but his memory of how and when he first heard about the attacks mixed up these details in a plausible but inaccurate way.
There was nothing necessarily malicious in Bush’s false memory—details sometimes shift in memory from one time to another or from one event to another. Yet conspiracy theorists, suffering from the illusion of memory (among other things), decided that Bush’s false recollections were not false at all, but Freudian slips that revealed a hidden truth. He said that he saw the first plane crash on television, so he
must have seen it. And if he saw it, whoever shot that secret footage must have known where to point a camera in advance, so Bush must have known the attack was going to happen before it did. The illusion of memory made some people jump to the conclusion that the government deliberately permitted or possibly even planned the attacks, skipping right over the more plausible (but less intuitive) explanation that Bush simply conflated some aspects of his memory for the first and second plane impacts in the attack.37
Experiments building on Brown and Kulik’s article on flashbulb memories have sought ways to verify the accuracy of these memories, often by obtaining recollections immediately after some tragic event and then testing the same people months or even years later. These studies consistently find that flashbulb memories, although richer and more vivid, are subject to the same sorts of distortions as regular memories. On the morning of January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. The very next morning, psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch asked a class of Emory University undergraduates to write a description of how they heard about the explosion, and then to answer a set of detailed questions about the disaster: what time they heard about it, what they were doing, who told them, who else was there, how they felt about it, and so on.38 Reports like these, written as soon as practicable after the event, provide the best possible documentation of what actually happened, just as the video of Bobby Knight and Neil Reed recorded the reality of the choking incident.
Two and a half years later, Neisser and Harsch asked the same students to fill out a similar questionnaire about the Challenger explosion. The memories the students reported had changed dramatically over time, incorporating elements that plausibly fit with how they could have learned about the events, but that never actually happened. For example, one subject reported returning to his dormitory after class and hearing a commotion in the hall. Someone named X told him what happened and he turned on the television to watch replays of the explosion. He recalled the time as 11:30 a.m., the place as his dorm, the activity as returning to his room, and that nobody else was present. Yet the morning after the event, he reported having been told by an acquaintance from Switzerland named Y to turn on his TV. He reported that he heard about it at 1:10 p.m., that he worried about how he was going to start his car, and that his friend Z was present. That is, years after the event, some of them remembered hearing about it from different people, at a different time, and in different company.
Despite all these errors, subjects were strikingly confident in the accuracy of their memories years after the event, because their memories were so vivid—the illusion of memory at work again. During a final interview conducted after the subjects completed the questionnaire the second time, Neisser and Harsch showed the subjects their own handwritten answers to the questionnaire from the day after the Challenger explosion. Many were shocked at the discrepancy between their original reports and their memories of what happened. In fact, when confronted with their original reports, rather than suddenly realizing that they had misremembered, they often persisted in believing their current “memory.”
Those rich details you remember are quite often wrong—but they feel right. As Neil Reed said about his memory of being choked by Bobby Knight, after seeing the videotape of what really happened: “As far as people coming in between, I remember people coming between us.”39 A memory can be so strong that even documentary evidence that it never happened doesn’t change what we remember.
Memories That Are Too Good to Be True
At a Thanksgiving dinner during the time we were writing this book, Chris’s father, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, recounted some of his memories of famous events. These included how he learned of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 (he was in summer camp at the time) and of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 (he and a friend were listening to a football game on the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by a news bulletin). Chris asked his father what he remembered of 9/11. He said that he was trying to travel from Connecticut to New York City that morning, and that he left home before hearing any of the news. He had to change trains at New Haven, but he was turned back with the news of the plane crashes and a statement that no trains were being permitted to enter the city. He decided to take a taxi home, for which he negotiated a fixed rate rather than the metered charge. The driver was listening to a call-in show on the radio, but none of the calls were about the morning’s news. He was wearing something like a turban on his head and appeared to be an Arab.40
This detail, that his taxi driver on the morning of 9/11 was of the same ethnicity or religion as the terrorists who attacked his destination, is a striking coincidence. We tend to put more trust in memories that include this sort of detail than we do in vague or generic recollections, especially when the detail has such a neat relationship to the rest of the story. Had Chris not been present, Ken Norman would have gotten away with his Captain Picard story in part because of the distinctiveness of the Baked Alaska, autograph-seeking cooks, and embarrassed manager. But as we have seen, these deceptively vivid details can be telltale traces of the processes of distortion and reconstruction that operate on memories after they are formed. Could the detail about the taxi driver be accurate? Certainly. Might Chris’s father have fabricated the Arab driver out of whole cloth? Possibly. Could he have inadvertently combined two separate memories, one of going home by taxi on 9/11 and another of having an Arab taxi driver (a common experience for someone living in the New York area)? Absolutely. The ironic final twist does make for a more compelling story—which is exactly what our memory systems are constantly, unbeknownst to us, striving to do.
Let’s revisit the story of Leslie and Tyce, the couple who witnessed a stabbing and were put on hold by 911. Within a minute of the event, they realized that they already disagreed about what they had seen. Despite recounting this story many times over the six years between the incident itself and their interviews with Chris, their memories have only diverged further: Leslie reported honking their horn to draw attention to the crime scene; when told of this, Tyce said “Really?” Leslie remembered being several lanes away from the sidewalk; Tyce recalled just a row of parked cars between them and the assault. Leslie thinks the attack happened in front of a dark, boarded-up building; Tyce recalls “a convenience store or takeout chicken store, a place with big neon lights in front.” Leslie says the attacker was bigger than the victim; Tyce says the opposite. Leslie thinks it took about thirty seconds for 911 to pick up, and that the conversation lasted three or four minutes; Tyce remembers a five-minute wait followed by a one-minute conversation. And while we told you that Leslie placed the call from the passenger seat while Tyce was driving, Tyce remembers himself calling 911 while Leslie was driving. It seems that our memory systems do like to place us in the center of the action.41
Think back one last time to your own memory of how you learned about the attacks of September 11, 2001. Now that you know about the illusion of memory, you know that you should doubt the veracity of your own recollections. But if you still have trouble overcoming the convincing impression that your memory is right, you aren’t alone. In a more recent flashbulb memory study, psychologists Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin examined people’s accounts of how they heard about the 9/11 attacks.42 Unlike all previous studies of flashbulb memories, theirs compared how well people remembered the flashbulb event with how well they remembered another event from about the same time. Thinking creatively and quickly at an emotional time, on September 12, 2001, Talarico and Rubin had a group of Duke University undergraduates come into the lab and complete a detailed questionnaire about how they first heard about the attacks. They also had the undergraduates recall another personal memory of their choosing that was still fresh in their minds from the few days just prior to the attacks. Then either 1, 6, or 32 weeks later, they asked their subjects to recall each event again. All of the memories, whether of 9/11 or of the more ordinary event, became more inaccurate as
more time passed. The longer the gap between the original recollection and the later test, the less consistent the memories, and the more false details they included.
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.”
Can We Ever Trust Our Memories?
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.