Page 170 - The Social Animal

152 The Social Animal

realize that we don’t remember our past as accurately as we would like
to believe. It is impossible to remember every detail of our lives. Seri-
ous revisions and important distortions occur over time. As you might
imagine, these revisions of autobiographical memory are not random.
Rather, we have a strong tendency to organize our personal history in
58
terms of what Hazel Markus calls self-schemas—coherent memo-
ries, feelings, and beliefs about ourselves that hang together and form
an integrated whole. Thus, our memories get distorted in such a way
that they fit the general picture we have of ourselves. For example, if
we have a general picture of our childhood as having been unhappy,
and our parents as having been cold and distant, any events from our
childhood that violate that general picture will be more difficult to re-
call than events that support it.Thus, over the years, our memories be-
come increasingly coherent and less accurate. In this manner, we
rewrite our personal histories. It isn’t that we are lying about our past;
it is that we misremember in a way that fits with our schemas.
A simple experiment by Michael Ross, Cathy McFarland, and
Garth Fletcher sheds considerable light on how this might come
59
about. In their experiment, college students received a persuasive
message arguing the importance of frequent tooth brushing. After
receiving the message, they changed their attitudes toward tooth
brushing. Needless to say, this is not surprising. But here’s what was
surprising: Later that same day in a different situation, the students
were asked, “How many times have you brushed your teeth in the
past 2 weeks?” Those who received the message recalled that they
brushed their teeth far more frequently than did students in the con-
trol condition. The students were not attempting to deceive the re-
searcher; there was no reason for them to lie.They were simply using
their new attitudes as a heuristic to help them remember. In a sense,
they needed to believe that they had always behaved in a sensible and
reasonable manner— even though they had just now discovered
what that sensible behavior might be.
Elizabeth Loftus has carried this line of research a step further.
She has shown how easy it is to plant false memories of childhood
experiences in the minds of young adults merely by instructing a
close relative to talk about these events as fact. 60 For example, if a
young man’s older sister said to him, “Remember the time when you
were five years old and you got lost for several hours at the Univer-
sity City shopping mall? And you went into a panic—and an oldish