I have to wonder to what extent people are being made to remember events that never happened, and to what extent they’re faking a familiarity with events they don’t really recall at all, because the idea that the interviewers would simply make up the events doesn’t occur to them, and they think that it would be embarrassing to admit unawareness of a real, politically relevant event.
For a bit, I thought that this seemed to set a floor on the number of respondents who must really be producing memories of the fake event (although significantly more people who claimed to remember the fake event picked it out as fake than would be predicted by chance if they had no way of distinguishing between them,) but it occurs to me that if the respondents were lying about remembering multiple events in the survey, then it doesn’t seem that the survey would be able to distinguish between respondents who picked the wrong event as fake because they had produced memories of it as vivid as of the others, and respondents who picked the wrong event as fake because there were multiple events on the survey that they didn’t remember, and their attempts to determine which one didn’t happen come down to luck.
There’s surprisingly little difference between real memories and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of planting false memories.
I sometimes give “false memory placebos” where I use the same techniques to give false memories of having hypnotized them for some effect, which then happens because they expect it to. That wouldn’t work if they didn’t alieve it was real.
There’s surprisingly little difference between real memories and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of planting false memories.
Corollary:
There’s surprisingly little difference between real sensory input and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of sending false sensory input.
I don’t think so. I suspect real sensory input are very different from imagined ones, it’s just that most of these differences aren’t preserved by the process that turns sensory inputs into memories.
Meh. To a conscious mind this makes no difference internally.
I sometimes have to experimentally verify whether a stimuli is real or imagined. Like moving closer to the perceived source of a sound/noise to see if it gets louder or not. If it does, it’s real, if it doesn’t, then it isn’t. As far as I know, this isn’t a particularly unique thing that happens only to me.
Only about half of the people being surveyed claimed to remember the false events, so clearly the procedure fails to produce false memories in a large proportion of those surveyed. Just because memories can be faked does not necessarily mean that all or even most of those claiming to remember the events have really produced false memories.
Although I have not done so on surveys, I can certainly attest that I’ve claimed to remember things that I didn’t remember at all; most often I’ve done it to avoid embarrassing other people.
Yes, it’s obviously possible to fail to implant false memories and have them still report that they remember.
I’m not claiming that just asking someone if they remember a fictitious event is enough to reliably implant false memories. I’m also not claiming that the mere existence of false memories under some circumstances means it’s definitely all of them in this case.
It’s just that in my experience its so easy to do real false memories that I think they’re mostly real.
That may be the case. But then, people do seem to lie on surveys quite a lot. I’d be interested to see if the results were significantly different if they used some method, such as dice, to minimize the rate of error by dishonesty.
I have to wonder to what extent people are being made to remember events that never happened, and to what extent they’re faking a familiarity with events they don’t really recall at all, because the idea that the interviewers would simply make up the events doesn’t occur to them, and they think that it would be embarrassing to admit unawareness of a real, politically relevant event.
If that’s the case they should be better at identifying the fake event after they were told that one is fake.
For a bit, I thought that this seemed to set a floor on the number of respondents who must really be producing memories of the fake event (although significantly more people who claimed to remember the fake event picked it out as fake than would be predicted by chance if they had no way of distinguishing between them,) but it occurs to me that if the respondents were lying about remembering multiple events in the survey, then it doesn’t seem that the survey would be able to distinguish between respondents who picked the wrong event as fake because they had produced memories of it as vivid as of the others, and respondents who picked the wrong event as fake because there were multiple events on the survey that they didn’t remember, and their attempts to determine which one didn’t happen come down to luck.
It’s the former.
There’s surprisingly little difference between real memories and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of planting false memories.
I sometimes give “false memory placebos” where I use the same techniques to give false memories of having hypnotized them for some effect, which then happens because they expect it to. That wouldn’t work if they didn’t alieve it was real.
Corollary:
There’s surprisingly little difference between real sensory input and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of sending false sensory input.
I don’t think so. I suspect real sensory input are very different from imagined ones, it’s just that most of these differences aren’t preserved by the process that turns sensory inputs into memories.
Meh. To a conscious mind this makes no difference internally.
I sometimes have to experimentally verify whether a stimuli is real or imagined. Like moving closer to the perceived source of a sound/noise to see if it gets louder or not. If it does, it’s real, if it doesn’t, then it isn’t. As far as I know, this isn’t a particularly unique thing that happens only to me.
Only about half of the people being surveyed claimed to remember the false events, so clearly the procedure fails to produce false memories in a large proportion of those surveyed. Just because memories can be faked does not necessarily mean that all or even most of those claiming to remember the events have really produced false memories.
Although I have not done so on surveys, I can certainly attest that I’ve claimed to remember things that I didn’t remember at all; most often I’ve done it to avoid embarrassing other people.
Yes, it’s obviously possible to fail to implant false memories and have them still report that they remember.
I’m not claiming that just asking someone if they remember a fictitious event is enough to reliably implant false memories. I’m also not claiming that the mere existence of false memories under some circumstances means it’s definitely all of them in this case.
It’s just that in my experience its so easy to do real false memories that I think they’re mostly real.
That may be the case. But then, people do seem to lie on surveys quite a lot. I’d be interested to see if the results were significantly different if they used some method, such as dice, to minimize the rate of error by dishonesty.