As we remember the same event repeatedly, a memory becomes like a copy of a copy of a copy, increasingly blurry and susceptible to distortions. Frederic Bartlett demonstrated this effect in individuals nearly a century ago with his experiments on remembering. When his University of Cambridge volunteers repeatedly recalled a Native American folktale, each iteration became increasingly distorted as they recalled the story through the schemas of their own cultural expectations and norms. Having studied cultural anthropology, Bartlett was curious how these distortions might play out when we transmit information to others.To address this question, he ran an experiment on serial reproduction, in which his Cambridge student volunteers were shown a simple line drawing of an African shield, then asked to redraw it from memory. Bartlett then gave the students drawings to another group of volunteers and asked them to reproduce the images from memory; these drawings were then reproduced from memory by a third group, and so on. As memories of the image were passed on from person to person, the drawings gradually began to look less like an African shield and more like a mans face. The sharing of memories for the shield morphed it into something the volunteers were familiar with and could easily communicate given their shared cultural knowledge.(Related: 17 Memory Strategies Youll Never Forget)
Can we trust our memory?
Memory researchers have since used Bartletts serial reproduction method to investigate how memories are distorted as they are passed within groups. In one experiment, volunteers were asked to memorize a story that included some information that was consistent with commonly held gender and social stereotypes (e.g., a football player drinks beer with his mates as they drive up the coast to a beach party) and some that was inconsistent (the footballer switches the radio station to classical music and stops at a roadside stand to buy himself flowers).When volunteers heard the original story, they recalled both stereotype-consistent and inconsistent information. By the second time the story was passed on to a new listener, the stereotype-consistent information remained, but the inconsistent information was lost. The information degraded even further from person to person if the information was passed on to people who endorsed the stereotype embedded in the story. This suggests that when we share memories of an event, information that conforms to our stereotypes is passed on to others, whereas inconsistent information is more likely to be lost. As a result, our collective memories can reflect and reinforce our preconceived ideas and biases.Other findings suggest that we also have a negativity bias in social transmission of memories as memories are shared from person to person, negative information (such as a story about corrupt behavior by a politician) is more likely to survive, whereas positive information (such as when a politician writes a bill to reduce corruption) is more likely to be lost. Even when events that are ambiguous are shared from person to person, they are more likely to be passed on with a negative spin.Distortions in collective memory are not just the result of preexisting biases. The mechanisms of memory are imperfect, and when information is communicated within a group, errors start to accumulate. Cognitive psychologist Roddy Roediger, who has extensively studied memory distortion in individuals, coined the term social contagion to describe how memory distortions seem to spread like viruses through social networks. To understand how this works, Roediger came up with an experiment in which groups of two people were given a set of photos to study, then asked to recall the items they remembered from those photos.There was, however, a catch: only one member of each group participating in the experiment was an actual volunteer who faithfully attempted to remember what was studied; the other member, who was planted by Roediger, deliberately recalled a few objects that were never shown. As you might expect, the true volunteers became infected by the misinformation and were more likely to recall the items that were previously recalled by the duplicitous collaborator.One interesting aspect of Roedigers experiment focused on attempts to either inoculate his volunteers from social contagion or to root out the false memories implanted by the collaborator. Even when the volunteers were warned that their collaborator might have mistakenly recalled items that were not in the set, they were still likely to remember the misinformation planted by their partner.When we share memories in groups, some people are especially effective at spreading misinformation. Those who dominate a group conversation are more likely to spread their memory errors to the rest of the group, as are those who are more confident or speak first. Sadly, we are even more susceptible to inheriting memory errors when they come from friends or others we trust. All these findings point to one of the most insidious consequences of collective memory: once distortions creep into our shared narratives, they can be incredibly difficult to root out.There are some factors that can protect us from social contagion. For instance, we tend to be more resistant to social contagion when we get information from people who are not perceived as credible sources (although, unfortunately, this tends to be children, the elderly, or individuals from an out-group). On a more positive note, we are also less susceptible to collective memory distortions when information is passed on interactivelywhen we actively engage with others, we are less likely to incorporate misinformation than when we passively receive information, say through social media.The tendency of groups to magnify and transmit memory errors can easily be exploited to spread misinformation, as evidenced by the viral spread of false information about the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, baseless election-fraud claims in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine. The rise of misinformation, planted in the public sphere as news, has even led to a new branch of applied research focused on the psychology of fake news.
Fake news isn’t a recent phenomenon
Long before the term fake news became a standard entry in English dictionaries, Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues studied how the mechanisms for implanting a false memory in an individual could be weaponized to spread false information throughout a population. In collaboration with Slate, an online magazine that covers politics and current affairs, Loftuss team ran an online experiment in 2010 to test peoples susceptibility to forming memories of fabricated news. The study, with over 5,000 surveyed, used a watered-down version of the memory-implantation recipe Loftus had developed in her lab nearly two decades earlier: Volunteers were exposed to a series of accurate news stories accompanied by actual photographs, and a fake news story accompanied by doctored photographs.One fabricated story read, President Obama, greeting heads of state at a United Nations conference, shakes the hand of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The story was accompanied by a photoshopped picture of Barack Obama shaking Ahmadinejads hand. In real life, the two never met in person. Nonetheless, almost half of the participants in Slates informal experiment who were exposed to the photo said that they remembered having seen that article in the news one year earlier. One Slate reader commented, The Chicago Trib had a big picture of this meeting, and another said, I remember most the political hay Republican bloggers made about the handshake.Overall, up to a third of the respondents inaccurately recalled the fake news incidents as news stories that they had previously read about, and when forced to choose, many were unable to tell real stories from the fabricated ones.
What makes people susceptible to fake news?
Part of what makes the human brain vulnerable to social contagion comes from our bias to believe and therefore remember information that is consistent with our preexisting beliefs. Fake news is easier to digest if it comes in a flavour we already like. Consistent with research on social contagion, belief in fake news is also increased when the information is emotionally arousing, when it includes photos as well as text, and when it comes from a source we know and trust.Fluency also plays an important role in social contagion. If we are repeatedly exposed to false information, it can become increasingly familiar, influencing our perception of the truth. As we have seen, we can gradually learn semantic knowledge through repeated exposure, and similar mechanisms can lead us to acquire beliefs that are not based in fact. We have all heard widely believed facts that are actually mythsthe Great Wall of China is visible from space; the MMR vaccine causes autism; Vikings wore helmets with horns on them; you only use 10 percent of your brain. Those myths take on a life of their own because they are widely repeated. Social contagion might take place more rapidly if that information is repeatedly shared by different people in our often-insular social media networks.Media consultants and political campaign strategists have mastered the art of spreading misinformation through social media channels, and memory researchers are still trying to catch up. Recent research has highlighted the use of push polls, designed not to collect opinions but to spread misinformation. Push polls first rose to the public consciousness during the 2000 South Carolina Republican Party presidential primary between George W. Bush and John McCain. In the run-up to the election, South Carolina residents were barraged with poll questions from the Bush campaign, such as Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child? McCain had actually adopted a child from an orphanage in Bangladesh, so the question was a blatant and carefully crafted work of misinformation.Other questions planted insinuations that McCain had proposed the largest tax increase in United States history and wanted to give labor unions and the media a bigger influence on the outcome of elections. When McCain learned of the push polls, he denounced the tactic, but the damage was done, and he lost the primary.Push polls seem to work by letting misinformation burrow into our memory. In an experiment involving over a thousand participants in Ireland, researchers demonstrated the shocking extent to which they can contaminate an individuals memory. When recalling an innocuous story about a fictitious politician named Catherine, over half of the participants in the study incorporated misinformation provided in a push poll. The study further demonstrated how push polls could reinforce beliefs in, and memory for, fake news articles about real public figures such as Pope Francis, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar, and Donald Trump.Participants in research experiments like these are all exposed to the same misinformation, but in the real world, different social groups often rely on disparate sources for the information they consume and share. As we become increasingly segregated along cultural, racial, and political lines, social contagion can lead us to develop entirely different memories of the same events, and hence different views of reality. All this can lead to polarization and tribalism, whereby negative misinformation about the other side can take hold and exacerbate harmful stereotypes.Fortunately, the effects of fake news can be mitigated by fact-checking, though the corrections need to be delivered in the right way. In one study, over 5,000 participants read through headlines with accompanying photos, some depicting actual events, while others were fabricated. The experiment was designed to see whether information from a third-party fact-checking website could be used to inoculate people against remembering the fabricated headlines as real events. Timing turned out to be everything.Fact-check warnings before or during readings had only a small effect on peoples tendency to recall the false articles as true, but warning people afterward made them 25 percent less likely to endorse the false headlines. These findings suggest that seeking out a fact-check after consuming fake news can enable us to update our memories and thereby curtail the effects of misinformation.
Adapted fromWhy We Remember: Unlocking Memorys Power to Hold On to What Mattersby Charan Ranganath, PhD. Copyright 2024 by Charan Ranganath. Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.Next: What to Do When Youre Feeling Lonely
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