FALSE MEMORY

When I was a  child in school i never celebrate my birthday in my school because most of the time my birthday comes on holidays. One of my schoolmates name Sam and he was my classmate till the graduation. One day during lunch I said to Sam that I am a unlucky guy because I never celebrate my birthday in school and he replied that '' You celebrated your birthday when we were in 7th standard , you weared black clothes also " his that reply shoked me completely and I thought that how it is possible it was my birthday and why I don't remember that? And why I weared black clothes? That was not a funeral it was a birthday. I asked about that day to others they also don't know.

After a great reserch on internet I come to a point that it may be Mandela effect or Multiverse. But that theory which I thought was most accurate and it was FALSE MEMORY.

Sometimes people have memories which are not of their own. Let's understand how these memories form and why. From centuries psychologists try to understand it. In  1974, Elizabeth and John Palmer conducted a study to investigate the effects of language on the development of false memory. The experiment involved two separate studies

In the first test, 45 participants were randomly assigned to watch different videos of a car accident, in which separate videos had shown collisions at 20 mph (32 km/h), 30 mph (48 km/h) and 40 mph (64 km/h). Afterwards, participants filled out a survey. The survey asked the question, "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" The question always asked the same thing, except the verb used to describe the collision varied. Rather than "smashed", other verbs used included "bumped", "collided", "hit", or "contacted". Participants estimated collisions of all speeds to average between 35 mph (56 km/h) to just below 40 mph (64 km/h). If actual speed was the main factor in estimate, it could be assumed that participants would have lower estimates for lower speed collisions. Instead, the word being used to describe the collision seemed to better predict the estimate in speed rather than the speed itself.

The second experiment also showed participants videos of a car accident, but the phrasing of the follow-up questionnaire was critical in participant responses. 150 participants were randomly assigned to three conditions. Those in the first condition were asked the same question as the first study using the verb "smashed". The second group was asked the same question as the first study, replacing "smashed" with "hit". The final group was not asked about the speed of the crashed cars. The researchers then asked the participants if they had seen any broken glass, knowing that there was no broken glass in the video. The responses to this question had shown that the difference between whether broken glass was recalled or not heavily depended on the verb used. A larger sum of participants in the "smashed" group declared that there was broken glass.

In this study, the first point brought up in discussion is that the words used to phrase a question can heavily influence the response given. Second, the study indicates that the phrasing of a question can give expectations to previously ignored details, and therefore, a misconstruction of our memory recall. This indication supports false memory as an existing phenomenon.

Replications in different contexts (such as hockey games instead of car crashes) have shown that different scenarios require different framing effects to produce differing memories.

Conclusion: False memory is a phenomenon where a person recalls something that did not happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory phenomena.

False memories are a component of false memory syndrome (FMS).

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