Memory Errors

Let’s learn about the last four of Schater’s seven sins of memory (the other three are included again as review).

Table 1. Schacter’s Seven Sins of Memory

Sin	Type	Description	Example
Transience	Forgetting	Accessibility of memory decreases over time	Forget events that occurred long ago
Absentmindedness	Forgetting	Forgetting caused by lapses in attention	You forget where your phone is
Blocking	Forgetting	Accessibility of information is temporarily blocked	Tip of the tongue
Misattribution	Distortion	Source of memory is confused	Recalling a dream memory as a waking memory
Suggestibility	Distortion	False memories created by persuasion or prompting from others	The result from leading questions
Bias	Distortion	Memories distorted by current belief system	Aligning memories to current beliefs
Persistence	Intrusion	Inability to forget undesirable memories	Traumatic events

Errors of Distortion

There are three errors of distortion: misattribution, suggestibility, and bias.

misattribution

Misattribution happens when you confuse the source of your information.

Let’s say Alejandro was dating Eva and they saw the Spider-Man: Homecoming movie together. Then they broke up and Alejandro saw Spider-Man: No Way Home movie with someone else. Later that year, Alejandro and Eva got back together. One day, they were discussing the films Alejandro mentioned how funny it was watching Eva’s surprise when some of the former Spidermen appeared together in Spider-Man: No Way Home. When Eva responded with a puzzled and then angry look, Alejandro realized he’d committed the error of misattribution.

 

 

One form of source misattribution is called cryptomnesia, which involves the unconscious influence of memory that causes current thoughts to be wrongfully attributed as novel. In other words, individuals mistakenly believe that they are the original generators of a thought when it really came from somewhere else.

When cryptomnesia arises in literature or scholarly ideas it is often termed “inadvertent plagiarism,” inadvertent because the subject genuinely believes the idea to be their own creation. Inadvertent plagiarism takes two forms. The first involves the plagiarizer regenerating a previously seen idea, but believing the idea to be novel. In the second form, the plagiarizer recalls the ideas of other author’s as their own. For example, a person may falsely recall creating an idea, thought, or joke, not intentionally engaging in plagiarism, but nevertheless believing to be the original source of memory.

A famous real-world example of this occurred in the early 1970s when ex-Beatle George Harrison released the hit single “My Sweet Lord” and was sued for copyright infringement because the tune was so similar to an earlier song, the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” The song was ruled to have been “subconsciously plagiarized” from the Chiffons’ from seven years earlier. How might a songwriter hear a song and enjoy it, but consciously forget about it—and years or decades later, write what they think is an original tune? It turns out to be a virtual duplication. Listen to the similarities below.

You can view the transcript for “My Sweet Lord vs. He’s So Fine” here (opens in new window).

The second distortion error is suggestibility.

suggestibility

Suggestibility is similar to misattribution, since it also involves false memories, but it’s different. With misattribution you create the false memory entirely on your own. With suggestibility, it comes from someone else, such as a therapist or police interviewer asking leading questions of a witness during an interview.

Memories can also be affected by bias, which is the final distortion error.

bias

Schacter (2001) says that your feelings and view of the world can actually distort your memory of past events. There are several types of bias:

• Stereotypical bias involves racial and gender biases. For example, when Asian American and White American research participants were presented with a list of names, they more frequently incorrectly remembered typical Black American names such as Jamal and Tyrone to be associated with the occupation basketball player, and they more frequently incorrectly remembered typical White names such as Greg and Howard to be associated with the occupation of a politician (Payne, Jacoby, & Lambert, 2004).
• Egocentric bias involves enhancing our memories of the past (Payne et al., 2004). Did you really score the winning goal in that big soccer match, or did you just assist?
• Hindsight bias happens when we think an outcome was inevitable after the fact. This is the “I knew it all along” phenomenon. The reconstructive nature of memory contributes to hindsight bias (Carli, 1999). We remember untrue events that seem to confirm that we knew the outcome all along.

Error of Intrusion

Have you ever had a song play over and over in your head? How about a memory of a traumatic event, something you really do not want to think about? This failure of the memory system involves the unwanted recall of information that is disturbing. The remembrance can range from a blunder on the job to a truly traumatic experience, and the persistent recall can lead to the formation of phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even suicide in particularly disturbing or intrusive instances.

persistence

When you keep remembering something, to the point where you can’t “get it out of your head” and it interferes with your ability to concentrate on other things, it is called persistence. It’s Schacter’s seventh and last memory error. It’s actually a failure of our memory system because we involuntarily recall unwanted memories, particularly unpleasant ones. For instance, you witness a horrific accident on the way to work one morning, and you can’t concentrate on work because you keep remembering the scene.

Alternatively, some memories may be forgotten because we deliberately attempt to keep them out of mind. Over time, by actively trying not to remember an event, we can sometimes successfully keep the undesirable memory from being retrieved either by inhibiting the undesirable memory or generating diversionary thoughts (Anderson & Green, 2001). Imagine that you slipped and fell in your high school cafeteria during lunch time, and everyone at the surrounding tables laughed at you. You would likely wish to avoid thinking about that event and might try to prevent it from coming to mind. One way that you could accomplish this is by thinking of other, more positive, events that are associated with the cafeteria. Eventually, this memory may be suppressed to the point that it would only be retrieved with great difficulty (Hertel & Calcaterra, 2005).