Creating False Memories

Ad men have known for years that they could make people feel good about a brand or product by telling happy stories. It’s one of the reasons Budweiser spends tens of millions of dollars on advertising during the Superbowl. They’re not exactly reaching a new audience (you think there’s anyone who watches the Superbowl who hasn’t heard of Bud Light?). Instead, they’re reinforcing the message that young, fun, attractive people drink Bud Light when they want to have fun, which they hope will prompt you to pick Bud Light over Coors or the hundreds of other beers next time you’re shopping.

Several things are working to make you pick Bud Light. First, it’s sheer repetition. The Bud Light name and logo are seared into your brain after seeing them so many thousands of times that it’s the first thing you think of when you think of beer. Second, you see a bunch of young, fun, attractive people drinking Bud Light at parties and social events. Both of these combine to form a powerful motivator: you’ve seen (fictional) people enjoying this product that’s ubiquitous. “It’s everywhere, and it’s what people seem to drink, so it’s probably good and I guess I’ll drink it too.”

It turns out that there may be an even stronger motivator. New research indicates that it might be extremely easy to create false memories, even when the subjects know the memories they have never happened. Psychologists Andrew Clark, Robert A. Nash, Gabrielle Fincham, and Giuliana Mazzoni conducted a three-stage experiment:

In Session 1 participants imitated simple actions, and in Session 2 they saw doctored video-recordings containing clips that falsely suggested they had performed additional (fake) actions. As in earlier studies, this procedure created powerful false memories. In Session 3, participants were debriefed and told that specific actions in the video were not truly performed. Beliefs and memories for all critical actions were tested before and after the debriefing.

The BPS Research Digest summarizes the study’s main conclusion: “The take-home finding is that for 25 per cent of the fake actions, the participants now reported significantly stronger memory scores than belief scores — in other words, their (false) memory of having performed the fake actions persisted even though they often no longer believed they’d performed the actions.”

I would not be surprised if this advertising had the same effect on our own memories. We’ve all had that experience where we’re sure something happened, but are later confronted with proof that it happened some other way. How much of that is just misremembering, and how much of that was planted?

That party that you had so much fun at where you drank 6 Bud Lights and finally had the courage to talk to that cute girl? Maybe you weren’t drinking Bud Light at all. Maybe your brain just switched the labels after the 400,000th commercial?

HT: Freakonomics