The Lie That Became a Memory After Four Repeats

Name: The Lie That Became a Memory After Four Repeats
Genre: Documentary

A laboratory inserts an object into a photographed room—and repetition helps participants remember something that was never there.

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Transcript

Participants encountered erroneous items from fictitious previous participants.
In 2013, Mark J. Huff, Sara D. Davis, and Michelle L. Meade tested it.
Participants studied six scenes: toolbox, bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, closet, and desk.
Each photographed room stayed onscreen for only 15 seconds.
That was in the room. I'm sure it was. The participant said it with complete confidence afterward.
Some took a 12-minute recall test; others did arithmetic instead.
Then came recall sheets attributed to five earlier participants.
Those sheets quietly inserted erroneous objects into scenes people had studied.
By final testing, every condition reported wrong objects.
Initial testing improved correct recall: 34 percent versus 29 percent.
But it did not significantly change false recall of suggested items.
It did help people reject false claims as coming from the original scene.
Memory is reconstructive, not a carbon copy of reality.
That source confusion has a name: the misinformation effect.
In 2010, Fiona Broome coined "Mandela Effect" after a false memory surfaced at Dragon Con.
Others there also believed Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s.
Participants frequently reported suggested contagion items on later tests.

But the five previous participants whose answers reshaped those memories had never existed.

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