Memories, of the Way We Thought It Used to Be

There seems to be a touch of hubris in most of us… thinking we can do things and remember things effectively, accurately and exceptionally. Let’s just start with a notion of overconfidence, an infection that has decimated more than one stock day-trader and makes even professionals look stupid.

“In a 2006 study entitled Behaving Badly, researcher James Montier found that 74% of the 300 professional fund managers surveyed believed that they had delivered above-average job performance. Of the remaining 26% surveyed, the majority viewed themselves as average. Incredibly, almost 100% of the survey group believed that their job performance was average or better. Clearly, only 50% of the sample can be above average, suggesting the irrationally high level of overconfidence these fund managers exhibited. 

“As you can imagine, overconfidence (i.e., overestimating or exaggerating one's ability to successfully perform a particular task) is not a trait that applies only to fund managers. Consider the number of times that you've participated in a competition or contest with the attitude that you have what it takes to win - regardless of the number of competitors or the fact that there can only be one winner.” Investopedia. Average really is a statistical reality, but how we rate ourselves seems to defy even common sense.

Then we come to simple memory, where people simply swear that they said something or experienced an event… that never ever happened. Think of the impact of that statement on our entire judicial system! When former-President George W Bush was asked about his insistence on a specific quote he swears he made in a specific speech that was fully recorded… that never happened, he said: “‘I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the president. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere.’ He then added, ‘One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.’

“That is how we all usually respond when our memory is challenged. We have an abstract understanding that people can remember the same event differently. The film ‘Rashomon’ made this point more than 60 years ago, the Showtime series ‘The Affair’ presents each episode from two conflicting viewpoints, and contradictory witness testimony is a crime drama trope. But when our own memories are challenged, we may neglect all this and instead respond emotionally, acting as though we must be right and everyone else must be wrong.” Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons writing in the December 1^st New York Times.

That we are absolutely certain about an occurrence is relevant, but hardly determinative. “Roediger III and K. Andrew DeSoto tested how well people could recall words from lists they had studied, and how measured they were in their recollections. For words that were actually on the lists, when people were highly confident in their memory, they were also accurate; greater confidence was associated with greater accuracy. But when people mistakenly recalled words that were similar to those on the lists but not actually on the lists — a false memory — they also expressed high confidence. That is, for false memories, higher confidence was associated with lower accuracy.

“To complicate matters further, the content of our memories can easily change over time. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett conducted a series of experiments that mimicked the ‘telephone’ game, in which you whisper a message to the person next to you, who then passes it along to the person next to them, and so on. Over repeated tellings, the story becomes distorted, with some elements remaining, others vanishing, and entirely new details appearing.

“When we recall our own memories, we are not extracting a perfect record of our experiences and playing it back verbatim. Most people believe that memory works this way, but it doesn’t. Instead, we are effectively whispering a message from our past to our present, reconstructing it on the fly each time. We get a lot of details right, but when our memories change, we only ‘hear’ the most recent version of the message, and we may assume that what we believe now is what we always believed. Studies find that even our ‘flashbulb memories’ of emotionally charged events can be distorted and inaccurate, but we cling to them with the greatest of confidence.” NY Times.

We tend to accord some folks – police officers, for example – greater credibility than witnesses with contrary recollections, but that is simply a social bias, hardly a reflection of reality. You’ll note all of the above side-steps completely the parallel impact of out-and-out lying; the human flaws illustrated in the above research simply reflect the passionate confidence of those who really believe that they are telling the truth. The passage of time, stress and the addition of tons of new sensory experiences all serve to complicate the relevant recollections. So remember these little nuances when you are damned sure something happened…

I’m Peter Dekom, and learning the necessary humility to accompany who we really are is a necessary part of maturity… for those who care to grow up!