magazine issue 11 2015 / Issue 28

Can you nonbelieve it: What happens when you do not believe in your memories?

• written by Jianqin Wang, Henry Otgaar, Mark Howe, Tom Smeets & Harald Merckelbach
• edited by Lieke Braadbaart

Otgaar and colleagues (2013) adapted this implantation method to elicit nonbelieved memories by debriefing individuals that the event suggested did not happen and then asking them whether they still believed or recollected the event. They found that for 40% of the participants who formed false memories, belief for the false event decreased, but that their memory representations for the hot balloon ride remained vivid.

Not only can people be led to form nonbelieved memories for false events, but they can also be induced to stop believing in memories for true experiences. Mazzoni, Clark, and Nash (2014) used the same procedure—the doctored video paradigm—to examine whether it was possible to persuade people to disbelieve, but recollect events that actually did happen. This topic is worth investigating because there are important real life equivalents. Consider the child victim who is told by the perpetrator that the abuse did not happen, or witnesses who are told during interrogations that genuine experiences did not occur. It is unclear how people’s memories and beliefs will be altered in such cases. Mazzoni and colleagues found that it was possible to undermine autobiographical belief for genuinely performed actions.

What Are the Implications?

Egg Salad

Recent work on the behavioural consequences of false memories has shown that false beliefs rather than false memories per se impact behaviour.  Typically, participants in this type of study complete a food history questionnaire and then are told that based on their answers, the computer has generated a health profile for them. The profile falsely suggests that as a child, they had gotten ill after eating a particular food, such as egg-salad. After about two weeks, their eating behaviour is measured. People receiving the suggestion consumed significantly less egg-salad compared to the control group, and this effect can last for months (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009; Scoboria, Mazzoni, Jarry, & Bernstein, 2012). Recent work has revealed that behavioural change is solely determined by belief and not recollection (Bernstein, Scoboria, & Arnold, 2015). One interesting research enterprise is therefore to run an “egg-salad” study, but this time debrief people about the fact that the profile is false and their memories of having gotten ill from egg salad were wrong. What would be the impact of nonbelieved memories on food-related behaviour? Based on recent work (Bernstein et al., 2015), the expectation would be that people will not avoid egg salad even when still retaining the false images of being ill as a child.

Trauma

Nonbelieved memories also have the potential to illuminate the links between recollection, belief and symptoms in certain populations, such as people with a traumatic history (e.g. retractors of abusive memories, PTSD patients). A factor worth noting for why people undermine their beliefs in the occurrence of traumatic experiences is that they have a strong desire to not remember the event. In Scoboria et al.’s (2015) research, a small percentage of college respondents (4%) were uncomfortable with or disliked the content of their memories and tried to “push it away from my mind” or “did not want to believe that that happened” (p.554). They successfully compelled themselves to withdraw belief, and thus formed nonbelieved memories.