Imagine this.
You have just started high school and
you’re having recess with this friend of yours that you’ve known since you were
both in year 4 at school. She starts talking to you about the time in primary
school when you hid all the pens and pencils that were on the teacher’s desk so
that your teacher had nothing to write with for that day. You remember that you
were somewhat of a mischievous child at school, but as much as you try you
can’t quite seem to remember ever hiding your teacher’s pens and pencils. Your
friend then pulls out a photo and says “Here, I’ll show you!” to which she
pulls out an old little photo with a child holding their shirt out like a tray
with a small pile of pens and pencils on it.
“Is that
really me?” you think to yourself. The photo isn’t in the best quality, but
you can certainly see what is going on in the picture.
“After you got them all you went and hid them behind
some books in the library! Don’t you remember? It was so funny!” Your friend
says through her laughter.
“I would do
something like that” you say as you smile with amusement. But then your friend
suddenly stops laughing and looks very closely at the picture again.
“Wait” she says, “That desk is wrong”
With curiosity you peer in closer and examine the
photo as best you can.
“This wasn’t our teacher’s desk” she continues,
“This was before I even came to your school! I must have taken this photo when
I was in year 3; this photo isn’t of you at all!”
Even more curious now, you grab the photo and look
much closer. You feel some sense of relief, but at the same time feel confused
because as your friend was telling the story, you could almost remember
yourself hiding your primary school teacher’s pens and pencils.
But you just imagined that right?
A group of researchers wanted to find out if it was
possible for people to remember stuff that actually never happened. Confused
yet?
In counselling, sometimes therapists suspect that
their clients have bottled-up feelings inside – stuff that doesn’t make them
function very well. These feelings could have been caused by an experience they
had as a child and so the therapist might ask their clients to go through old
family photo albums in the hope of bringing up some suspected bottled-up
feelings.
You may be wondering, if the feelings don’t make
them function very well, then why do they need to be brought up? Well, the
therapist believes that if these feelings are brought up then they can be dealt
with properly, which will make that person function better in the long run.
The only concern with doing this is that clients may
start to remember things about themselves that never really happened. Maybe a
better way to put it is this; as these clients look at old family photos at the
same time listening to their therapist ask about, for example, domestic
violence in their family, they can actually create
a story in their own mind where they play as the main character. Their mind
processes a made up story as a memory. They confuse fact with fiction.
So in this example, the client may start to believe
that they were physically abused as a child because they are looking at an old
family photo and at the same time being questioned about domestic violence.
Can you think of some reasons why this might be a
problem?
The main thing that these researchers were looking
for was to see if people were more likely to remember these false events if
they were shown a photo at the same time as hearing a story about themselves (Wade,
Garry, Read & Lindsay, 2002, p. 151).
So, these researchers asked about 50 people to take
part in an experiment to test this whole idea. The researchers asked the
parents of each of the students to provide them with stories about two
childhood experiences that the students had. For half of these students, their
parents were also asked to provide three class photos of their child in their early
years of school
So, the researchers had two real stories for each student, and for half of them they also
had three class photos.
The researchers then came up with a fake story that they would use with the
third class photo. They found out the names of teachers and particular
classmates to use in the story to make each student believe that the story was
true. The story in this case was similar to the story you read at the top of
the page, in that a child played a prank on their teacher. In this story though,
the prank involved some slime!
After receiving all this information, the
researchers interviewed each of the students and talked about the three
stories. Two of them were real stories and one of them was the made up story.
After interviewing them all, the researchers found
that the students with the class photos were more likely to remember these
false events than the group of students without the class photos.
But why?
Well, it may be because the photo added to the “realness”
of the story (Paddock & Terranova, 2001). In other words, the photo may
have made the students more confident in believing that the event actually
happened. Also, because it was a class photo and not a photo of the actual
event, the students may have started to wonder who in their class they would
have done the prank with (Hyman and Billings 1998).
Maybe the greatest reason for this belief though was
that the photo showing what the teacher and other classmates looked like may
have mixed with the imaginations of the students (Johnson, Hashtroudi, &
Lindsay, 1993). This may have helped the students believe that what they were
imagining in their mind was actually fact, and not fiction.
Pretty weird huh? This research shows that the brain
is sometimes not the most reliable source of information!
Talk about this stuff with your friends, what might
all this mean for you?
Maybe you can use it to convince Santa how good you’ve
really been all year!
Reference List
Hyman, I. E., Jr., & Billings, F. J. (1998).
Individual differences and the creation of false childhood memories,Memory, 6,
1-20
Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S., & Lindsay, D. S.
(1993). Source monitoring, Psychologica Bulletin, 114, 3-28
Paddock, J. R, & Terranova, S. (2001). Guided
visualisation and suggestibility: Effect of perceived authority on recall of
autobiographical memories. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 162, 347-356
Wade, K. A, Garry, M, Read, J. D, & Lindsay, D.
S (2002). A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create
false childhood memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9 (3),
597-603.
