Memory Errors

Let’s learn about the last four of Schacter’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

In addition to forgetting, our memories can also be distorted—changed, reshaped, or influenced by inaccurate information. Daniel Schacter (2001) identified three distortion errors: misattribution, suggestibility, and bias. These distortions show that memory is not a perfect recording device but a reconstructive process.

Misattribution

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 reaction to Spider-Man: No Way Home. When Eva responded with a puzzled and then angry look, Alejandro realized he’d committed the error of misattribution.

 

Cryptomnesia is source confusion taken a step further: a person unknowingly mistakes an old memory for a brand-new idea.

In cryptomnesia, you:

• Remember the idea, but
• Forget where it came from,
• Leading you to believe you invented it.

This is sometimes called inadvertent plagiarism because the person genuinely believes the idea is original.

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.

Real-World Example: George Harrison

In the 1970s, former Beatle George Harrison released My Sweet Lord. He was later sued because the melody was nearly identical to He’s So Fine by The Chiffons. The court ruled it “subconsciously plagiarized”—a textbook case of cryptomnesia.

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).

How does this happen? A musician may hear a song years earlier, forget it consciously, and later “create” a tune that feels original but is actually a memory resurfacing without its source.

Suggestibility

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.

For example, a police interviewer asks a witness: “What color was the robber’s hat?” This question assumes there was a hat. Later, the witness may confidently “remember” the hat—even though it never existed.

Therapists, teachers, friends, or family members can unintentionally create similar effects by asking leading questions or offering details a person then incorporates into their own memory.

Bias

The third distortion error is bias—the tendency for our current feelings, beliefs, expectations, or worldview to influence how we remember the past. According to Schacter (2001), memory is never a perfect playback of events. Instead, we reconstruct memories in ways that often align with our present attitudes and assumptions.

bias

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 refers to the tendency to remember the past in a self-enhancing way.
  
  Maybe you vividly remember scoring the winning goal in that youth soccer game—but in reality, you assisted while someone else kicked it in. Over time, our memories shift to favor our role or perspective, sometimes without us realizing it.
• Hindsight bias happens when we think an outcome was inevitable after the fact. This is the “I knew it all along” phenomenon. For example, after learning the ending of a mystery novel, you may feel like you “saw the clues” clearly—even if you didn’t notice them before.

Error of Intrusion

The final memory error, persistence, is different from forgetting and distortion because it involves memories that are too strong and intrusive.

persistence

Persistence refers to the inability to forget information—even when we desperately want to. These unwanted memories may be annoying, distressing, or deeply traumatic.

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.

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).