![]() Why might this be? One theory is that rehearsing our memories of past events can temporarily make those memories malleable. The 'real you' is a myth – we constantly create false memories to achieve the identity we want Participants who took a practice memory test shortly before reading the false information were more likely to reproduce this false information in the final memory test. But these studies found something even more fascinating. ![]() Hundreds of studies already show that people will unwittingly add false details like these to their memories. The aim of these studies was to see how many of the false details people would eventually reproduce in the final memory test. Second, all of the participants were given a description of the film to read, which contained some false details. First, half of the participants took a practice memory test. But during the days between watching the film and taking the final test, two other things happened. ![]() In a typical study of this effect, participants watched a short film, then took a memory test a few days later. This is known as “retrieval-enhanced suggestibility”. In fact, sometimes simply the act of rehearsing a memory can be exactly what makes it susceptible to change. ![]() Results like these show us how our memories can change spontaneously over time, as a product of how, when, and why we access them. To an extent, these participants’ stories had become their memories. When participants later tried to remember the fight in a neutral, unbiased way, the two groups still gave somewhat differing accounts of what had happened, mirroring the attitude of their original audience. More importantly though, the way people told their story later affected the way they remembered the fighter’s behaviour. Participants gave more negative accounts of the behaviour of the fighter if they believed the stranger disliked him. Unsurprisingly, this extra information shaped how people described the video to the stranger. The other group was told that the stranger liked this same fighter. One group was told that the stranger disliked one of the two fighters in the video. The study’s participants were split into two groups. Afterwards, participants were asked to tell a stranger what they had seen. In the video, two intoxicated men get into a physical confrontation after one man has argued with his friend, and the other has seen his favourite football team lose a match. In one study on the audience-tuning effect, participants watched a video of a bar fight. We often describe our memories differently depending on who’s listening. This is known as the “audience-tuning effect”. Research shows that when we describe our memories differently to different audiences it isn’t only the message that changes, but sometimes it’s also the memory itself. And we might change the story’s details depending on the listener’s attitudes or political leaning. We might ask ourselves whether it’s vital to get the facts straight, or whether we only want to make the listener laugh. When we describe our memories to other people, we use artistic license to tell the story differently depending on who’s listening. ![]() And whenever these flaws happen, they can have long-term effects on how we’ll recall that memory in the future. There are countless reasons why tiny mistakes or embellishments might happen each time we recall past events, ranging from what we believe is true or wish were true, to what someone else told us about the past event, or what we want that person to think. Over time the message can become very different from the original. Each time the message is relayed, some parts might be misheard or misunderstood, others might get innocently altered, improved, or forgotten. In the game, one person quietly whispers a message to the person beside them, who then passes it on to the next person in line, and so on. To understand a bit about how remembering works, consider the “telephone game” (also known as “Chinese whispers”). What’s worse, we’re often guilty of changing the facts and adding false details to our memories without even realising. Yet evidence shows that our memory isn’t as consistent as we’d like to believe. We rely on our memories not only for sharing stories with friends or learning from our past experiences, but we also use it for crucial things like creating a sense of personal identity. Your memory probably isn’t as good as you think it is. ![]()
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