Remembering "The Facts"

I have to confess to being an avid follower (although rare contributor) to various Welsh rugby chat lines although I think it’s my love of psychology rather than my love of rugby which keeps me glued to these discussions.

I particularly enjoy the heated debates about “what happened at the game last night” – how can two parties who both (in theory) witnessed the same game (albeit wearing different coloured shirts) produce such wildly different “factual” accounts of what happened? I can understand there would be differences in interpretation between the two sets of supporters and certainly differences in the perceived significance of various incidents but it’s the differences in the reported facts about individual performances which intrigues me.

So, I was interested to read a few weeks ago about a study by David Pizarro at Cornell University. He told experimental subjects a ‘true’ story about a man who walked out of a restaurant without paying the bill. Half the subjects were told that the man left the restaurant because he was a thief who regularly stole. The other half of the subjects were told that the man rushed out because he’d received an emergency call on his mobile ‘phone. A week later, when recalling this story, those who had been told the man was a thief remembered the restaurant bill as being 10-25% higher than it actually was. Those who thought the man had rushed off to deal with an emergency recalled the bill as being lower than it actually was!

So, it seems our memory for facts can indeed be altered depending on the attitude we hold towards the key actors in any event.

My late father, who suffered from fronto-temporal dementia, used to relate to us increasingly distorted factual accounts of his day to day life. He once told me how the previous day “two young men grabbed hold of me so hard that one rib bone flew past my right ear and one past my left ear and I hit the ceiling so hard I stuck there by my hair”. In his case, my father seemed to have reached a point where his mind would fairly freely construct a ‘factual’ story out of nowhere to ‘account’ for his strongly positive or negative attitude towards individuals he had encountered. His memory for events seemed disturbingly bizarre at the time. But, on reflection, maybe it was simply a more extreme version of the way all our memories work – we start with a gut level emotional response (blood chemistry basically) and construct (or at least adapt) the ‘facts’ to match the feelings.

Now back to the rugby chat lines…