magazine issue 7 2016 / Issue 31

Was that how it happened? Shaping our memory for personal experiences in conversation with others

• written by Joanne Rechdan, Melanie Sauerland, Lorraine Hope & James Ost
• edited by Emir Efendic

Source Misattribution: Williams could have muddled his account with that of others

Inaccuracies in co-constructed memories can sometimes be the result of source monitoring errors. Source monitoring refers to one’s ability to identify the origin of remembered information (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). After recalling an event with others, individuals may fail to identify inaccuracies in the account introduced by other group members, and instead attribute these to the experienced event. For example, Meade and Roediger (2002) showed a participant and a confederate pictures of typical household scenes (e.g. kitchen, bedroom, desk). Afterwards, the participant and confederate were asked to verbally recall items they had seen. In this phase, the confederate named some items that had not actually appeared in the scenes. Later, when participants completed an individual recall test for items from the scenes, they sometimes incorporated the items that had been mentioned by the confederate but were not actually present in the original scene. These results demonstrate the spread of a memory from one person to others through verbal interaction, termed social contagion of memory (Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001).

Williams may have discussed his experience with those who were present in the helicopter that was hit. It is possible that through interviews and casual conversations with service personnel who were closer to the action, Williams picked up information and details about the event, and over time, incorporated them into his memory.

The role of egocentrism: Williams brought himself closer to the action

Source monitoring errors can often have an egocentric bias. People can confuse details reported by someone else as having been reported by themselves. Hyman and colleagues had participants study word lists individually and then recall them in pairs (Hyman, Roundhill, Werner, & Rabiroff, 2014). Some of the words on the lists were studied by both members of the pair, some were studied by only one member, and some had not been previously studied by either member. After engaging in collaborative recall of the words, each individual completed a source-monitoring task in which they identified the source of each recalled word. Participants made frequent source attribution errors and these errors tended to be egocentric, in that participants mistakenly attributed recalled words to themselves more often than to their partners.

Real-life examples of egocentrism in memory reports have been documented in the literature. In the wake of the Watergate scandal in the United States, psychologist Ulric Neisser conducted an in-depth assessment of the testimony of John Dean, a former counsel to President Nixon (Neisser, 1981). Dean gave the Watergate Investigating Committee detailed information about classified conversations that later turned out to have been tape-recorded. Thus, the case offered a perfect opportunity for comparing Dean’s retellings with what had actually been said. Neisser found that Dean accurately reported the overall gist of the conversations, but his detailed recollection of specific episodes was poor. Neisser also noted that Dean tended to exaggerate his role, making himself more central to the plot, and dramatized events—much like Williams did.

In conclusion: Williams’ public apology for his very human error

In an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s The Today Show several months after his controversial blunder, Williams apologized for his behavior, and offered some explanation for what had happened. He noted the “double standard” with which he had chosen his words in a work setting and outside of work. Williams admitted that it was “ego” that caused him to want to put himself closer to the action. He also mentioned that he had told the story correctly for years before telling it incorrectly, saying that eventually “It got mixed up, it got turned around in my mind.” Williams insisted that he was not intentionally trying to mislead people. Indeed, given his explanation for what happened, it seems plausible that his memory for the event was influenced by a combination of factors discussed throughout this paper. Having told his story to entertain on some occasions, retrieval induced forgetting may have reinforced his memory for embellishments at the expense of more accurate details.