Re: Wow.

["Peter T. Chattaway" <petert at interchange_ubc.ca>]

On Sat, 1 Feb 2003 Ysobelle at aol_com wrote:
> Who remembers where they were the last time?

Fewer of us than we might suspect.  To quote something I posted here a
while ago (can't find the URL in the archive right now, though):

- - -

I haven't studied memory in detail, but there's a fascinating chapter on
the subject in John Dominic Crossan's _The Birth of Christianity_. You
know how everyone says they can remember *exactly* where they were and
*exactly* what they were doing when they heard that Kennedy died, or when
they heard that the Challenger exploded, etc.? Crossan describes a study
conducted at Emory University after the Challenger exploded. The day
after the disaster, 106 students in Psychology 101 wrote down how they had
first heard of it. Two-and-a-half years later, in October 1988, the 44
students who still attended Emory filled out the questionnaire all over
again; follow-up interviews were conducted in March 1989. And the changes
between the January 1986 and October 1988 accounts were fairly drastic:

   When those second versions were compared with the first ones for
   accuracy and graded on a 0-7 scale for major (LOCATION, ACTIVITY,
   INFORMANT) and minor (TIME, OTHERS) attributes of the event, "the mean
   was 2.95 out of a possible 7. Eleven subjects (25%) were wrong about
   everything and scored 0. Twenty-two of them (50%) scored 2 or less;
   this means that if they were right on one major attribute, they were
   wrong on both of the others. Only three subjects (7%) achieved the
   maximum possible score of 7; even in these cases there were minor
   discrepancies (e.g., about the time of the event) between the recall
   and the original report. What makes these low scores interesting is the
   high degree of confidence that accompanied many of them" (18).

   Confidence in the inaccuracy is surely much more disquieting than the
   inaccuracy itself, and the visual vividness with which the inaccuracy
   was recalled was even more disquieting. The mean for accuracy was 2.95
   out of 7, as I noted; the mean for confidence was 4.17 out of 5, and
   the mean for "VISUAL vividness" was 5.35 out of 7! In the instance
   given above, for example, the subject rated the confidence of her 1988
   memory at a 5 ("absolutely certain") for LOCATION, ACTIVITY, INFORMANT,
   OTHERS and at a 4 for TIME (2:00 or 3:00 P.M., rather than 11:39 A.M.
   EST). Its actual rating was 0 on all counts.

   In the follow-up interviews after the twin questionnaires had been
   compared, the researchers made another significant discovery. The
   subjects' memories for their second-version accounts remained
   "remarkably consistent" between October 1988 and March of 1989, and
   when the researchers tried to help the subjects recover their
   first-version accounts, they found that "none of [their] procedures had
   any effect at all" (Neisser and Harsch 13). Even when subjects were
   shown their own original reports, they never "even pretended that they
   now recalled what was stated on the original record. On the contrary,
   they kept saying, 'I mean, like I told you, I have no recollection of
   it at all' or 'I still think of it as the other way around.' As far as
   we can tell, the original memories are just gone" (21). Flashbulbs
   illuminate but also blind: at least in this one case where checking was
   possible, neither visual vividness nor confident assertion bore any
   strong relationship to accuracy. . . .

   I do not think that eyewitnesses are always wrong; but, for example, if
   eyewitness testimony is a prosecution's ONLY evidence, there is always
   and intrinsically a REASONABLE DOUBT against it. ALWAYS. As John
   Bohannon and Victoria Symons put it, "In studies of eyewitness
   testimony, the most favorable estimates of the correlation between
   confidence and accuracy are about .40" (67).

   -- John Dominic Crossan, _The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What
   Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus_, New
   York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998, pages 62-63, 68.

- - -

FWIW, I remember being in my high school's computer lab, and hearing about
it when my classmates came back from lunch and said they'd heard about it
on the car radio.  But my memory could be wrong about that.

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 If true love never did exist how could we know its name? -- Sa Phillips
          Happiness happens but I want joy. -- Marjorie Cardwell

---------------
Unsubscribe by going to http://www.actwin.com/OtR/