| The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, April 02, 2008, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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More on Clinton's memory muddle. Psychologist Carol Tavris has a special childhood memory. It involves her father and a children's book called The Wonderful O.
"A band of pirates takes over an island and forbids the locals to speak any word or use any object containing the letter 'O'," she recounts. "I have a vivid memory of my father reading The Wonderful O and our laughing together at the thought of shy Ophelia Oliver saying her name without its Os. I remember trying valiantly, along with the invading islanders, to guess the fourth O word that must never be lost (after love, hope, and valour), and my father's teasing guesses: Oregon? Orangutan? Ophthalmologist?" Tavris's father died when she was a child, so she treasured this memory. "And then, not long ago," she concludes, "I found my first edition of The Wonderful O. It had been published in 1957, one year after my father's death. I stared at the date in disbelief and shock." Tavris's memory was richly detailed, emotional and meaningful. And it was false. It was a reflection not of reality, but of what she wished reality to be. "I have a set of beliefs about my father, the warm man he was, the funny and devoted dad who loved to read to me and take me rummaging through libraries, the lover of wordplay," she writes in her book Mistakes Were Made. "So it was logical for me to assume -- no, to remember -- that he was the one who read me The Wonderful O." Last week, I wrote a column about Hillary Clinton's now-infamous story about landing under sniper fire in the Balkans. It's wrong to assume she's a liar or a fantasist, I argued. The former first lady has spent the better part of a decade re-defining herself as a tough, tested leader and so it is not surprising that her memories would evolve to support the self-image she is constructing. That's what memories do. Readers hated that column. I was deluged with e-mail and nine out of 10 told me I was daft. Hillary Clinton has a record of mendaciousness exceeded only by her husband's litany of lies, most wrote. She's a liar. The sniper story was a lie. Many also thought it impossible that a normal memory could produce vivid recollections of a dramatic event that never happened. "I have no trouble accepting your thesis regarding tricks that memory plays on us," wrote one, but "hitting the ground running under sniper fire is not something that one would 'recall' unless one had actually experienced it at least once."
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That seems to be the consensus view. "We have to hope they were lies," wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, "because if they weren't, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we had thought." I won't re-hash the debate here. I find it implausible that a canny politician like Hillary would repeatedly tell an easily exposed lie that delivers little benefit at considerable risk. Others find it easy to imagine. Fine. What concerns me here is the idea that our memories may play "tricks" now and then but they cannot make major mistakes about dramatic events. With all due respect, that idea is wrong. In 1999, Associated Press reporters broke the story of a massacre of civilians committed by American soldiers during the Korean War. A key source was Edward Daily, a veteran and author of several books about the unit responsible. Daily admitted he had been involved. It haunted him, he said, and so he helped the reporters by contacting other veterans and talking with them about the crime. But then the reporters found documents that proved Daily had been elsewhere on the fateful day. He was stunned. "I feel like I'm in a dream world," he said. Equally dismayed were the soldiers Daily had contacted. "I know that Daily was there," one insisted. "I know that. I know that." The memories were real. And false. A much less dramatic example of wartime muddle features Peggy Noonan's old boss, Ronald Reagan. During the 1980 presidential campaign -- more than a decade before Alzheimer's started to take its toll -- Reagan repeatedly told a story about heroism from the Second World War. In a bomber hit by anti-aircraft fire and going down, the Gipper recalled, a wounded gunner was unable to bail out. "Never mind, son," the captain told the gunner, "we'll ride it down together." The captain was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Reagan told rapt audiences. A journalist searched the record but could find no such award or incident. He did, however, find a 1944 movie called A Wing and a Prayer which featured a wounded gunner and his selfless captain. Was Reagan lying? Few thought so. When Reagan told the story, he invariably choked up -- a routine that seemed beyond the limited skills of the old Hollywood actor. Besides, Reagan's story was, like Clinton's, absurdly easy to debunk. The risk in telling this "lie" would be huge, the benefit tiny. Why do it? Memory researchers now accept that Reagan innocently transformed a memory of a fictional film into a memory of a real event. That sort of thing happens all the time. It's normal. So are more dramatic -- and potentially consequential -- memory mistakes.
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During the panic about childhood sexual abuse that swept North America in the late 1980s, two young daughters accused their parents of a long list of crimes. Encouraged by officials, the daughters' claims became more and more outlandish. Doubts grew. Richard Ofshe, a University of California sociologist, was allowed to interview the accused father. Your daughters are now accusing you of forcing them to have sex together, Ofshe told the man. Do you remember that incident? No, the father answered. Ofshe asked him to imagine the scene. Think about it. Are you sure you remember nothing? Eventually, the father did remember the incident and he gave Ofshe a detailed, three-page confession. This, despite the fact that the girls' accusations did not include the crime the father confessed to. Ofshe had invented the whole thing. And how's this for vivid and dramatic: a jet crashes into an 11-storey apartment building, killing the crew of the airplane and 32 residents of the building. Ten months after just such a crash occurred in Amsterdam, Dutch psychologists asked people if they had seen the television video of the jet hitting the building. A little more than half said they had. In follow-up interviews, two-thirds said they remembered the images. In reality, none had seen the crash because there was no TV video. But the mere suggestion that there was video caused most people to form a false memory of having seen the horrifying images. "We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences -- unknowingly and unconsciously -- in light of what we now know or believe," writes Harvard psychologist and leading expert on memory Daniel Schachter. "The result can be a skewed rendering of a specific incident, or even of an extended period in our lives, which says more about how we feel now than about what happened then." Maybe Hillary lied. I can't say for sure. But I do know that a very plausible explanation for her statement lies in the science of memory. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |