At this point Ken told us that at Legal Sea Food, Patrick Stewart had been dining with an attractive younger woman who, based on snippets of overheard conversation, appeared to be a publicist or agent. For dessert Stewart ordered Baked Alaska—a choice that stood out in memory because it appears rarely on restaurant menus. Toward the end of his meal, another distinctive event happened: Two members of the kitchen staff came out to Stewart’s table and asked for his autograph, which he readily granted. Moments later, a manager appeared and apologized, explaining that the “Trekkie” cooks’ action was against restaurant policy. Stewart shrugged off the supposed offense, and he and his companion were soon on their way.
The only problem with the story was that it had actually happened not to Ken, but to Chris. Ken had heard Chris tell the story some time before and had incorporated it into his own memory. In fact, Ken felt so strongly that the memory was his, and had so completely forgotten that Chris was the original raconteur, that even Chris’s presence when Ken retold the story did not jog his memory of the way in which he had actually “encountered” Captain Picard. But when Chris pointed out the error, Ken quickly realized that this memory was not his own. This anecdote illustrates another aspect of the illusion of memory: When we retrieve a memory, we can falsely believe that we are fetching a record of something that happened to us rather than someone else.
Although we believe that our memories contain precise accounts of what we see and hear, in reality these records can be remarkably scanty. What we retrieve often is filled in based on gist, inference, and other influences; it is more like an improvised riff on a familiar melody than a digital recording of an original performance. We mistakenly believe that our memories are accurate and precise, and we cannot readily separate those aspects of our memory that accurately reflect what happened from those that were introduced later. That’s how Ken appropriated Chris’s story—he had a vivid memory for the event, but mistakenly attributed it to his own experience. In the scientific literature, this type of distortion is known as a failure of source memory. He forgot the source of his memory, but because it was so vivid, he assumed that it came from his own experience.
Source memory failures contribute to many cases of unintentional plagiarism. In the classes we teach, we occasionally encounter intentional plagiarism (or a gross misunderstanding of the right way to do research) when a student copies sections of a paper from Wikipedia or other sources. Unintentional plagiarism refers to cases in which people are convinced that an idea was their own when they actually learned about it from someone else. Recently, bestselling spiritual author Neale Donald Walsch was caught plagiarizing a story originally written by Candy Chand that had circulated on spirituality websites and blogs for more than a decade.29 The story describes a group of students who were using placards to spell out “Christmas Love” in a winter pageant rehearsal. One student accidentally held her letter “m” upside down, resulting in the phrase “Christ was Love.” Walsch posted the story to Beliefnet.com in December 2008 as if it had happened to his son Nicholas. But it actually happened to Chand’s son, who also is named Nicholas, twenty years earlier—before Walsch’s son was even born. In this case, it is clear that Walsch appropriated someone else’s story. The question, though, is whether he was plagiarizing intentionally or whether he merely misappropriated the memory. In acknowledging a “serious error,” Walsch stated:
I am truly mystified and taken aback by this…Someone must have sent it to me over the internet ten years or so ago…Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of “stories to tell that have a message I want to share.” I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized…and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.
This case bears all the hallmarks of a failure of source memory. Walsch remembered the story, having read and retold it many times. The fact that the child in the story had the same name as his son made it easier for him to come to believe that the memory was his. (Our friend Ken Norman probably picked up Chris’s story more readily because he had dined at the same Legal Sea Food restaurant.) Walsch kept a record of the story in his file and came to believe that he had written it. In his interview with the New York Times, Walsch said, “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.” Chand, however, thinks the theft was intentional: “If he knew this was wrong, he should have known it was wrong before he got caught…quite frankly, I’m not buying it.” Both Chand’s indignation and Walsch’s astonishment are entirely consistent with the illusion of memory. Walsch doesn’t understand how he could have mistakenly appropriated another person’s memory, and Chand doesn’t believe that he could have done so innocently. They both think that memory must be more faithful to experience than it really is.
Just as we cannot be certain that Kenny Conley suffered from inattentional blindness when he reported not seeing Michael Cox being beaten, we cannot say for certain whether Walsch’s plagiarism was intentional or accidental. What we can say, though, is that it is possible that Walsch internalized someone else’s memory and lost track of the source of the story. Such source memory failures are common, and they even can be created in the laboratory. In a clever study, psychologists Kimberly Wade, Maryanne Garry, Don Read, and Stephen Lindsay asked subjects to view a doctored photograph showing the subject enjoying a hot air balloon ride as a child.30 The subjects were each interviewed several times, and were asked each time to recall the event, or if they could not recall it, to imagine that it had happened to themselves. Although none of the subjects had ever taken a hot air balloon ride, the photograph and attempts to recall it led some of them to incorporate information about the image into their personal narrative memories. Half the subjects created a false memory about the balloon ride, some embellishing their memories substantially beyond what was shown in the photograph.
The ability to change memories using doctored photographs has Orwellian ramifications. If we can induce false memories simply by editing images, it might be possible to literally revise history, changing the past by doctoring it. Using a similar approach, Dario Sacchi, Franca Agnoli, and Elizabeth Loftus showed subjects an edited version of the famous photograph of a single person standing in front of a column of tanks during the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.31 In the original version of the photograph, only the lone protester was visible on the wide road. The doctored version shows crowds of people lining a narrower road on both sides of the tanks. When they were quizzed about the historical facts of Tiananmen Square only moments later, those who viewed the doctored photograph believed that far more people had been at the protest.
Forgetting a Life-and-Death Matter
Memory distortions are not limited to irrelevant details like whether or not books were in an office or particular words were part of a list. In fact, they can apply to life-and-death decisions, even those that you yourself have made. Australian psychologist Stefanie Sharman and her colleagues conducted an experiment that calls to mind the classic Seinfeld episode in which Kramer asks Elaine to help him and his lawyer work through a long list to decide the medical circumstances under which he would be willing to carry on living. (Lawyer: “OK. One lung, blind and you’re eating through a tube.” Kramer: “Naw, that’s not my style.” Elaine: “Borrrr-ing.”) The researchers interviewed adults and asked them to make (more realistic) decisions about which life-sustaining treatments they’d want if they were seriously ill.32 For example, would they want only CPR performed, or would they also want to be fed artificially if necessary? They interviewed the same people twelve months later using the same questions.
Overall, 23 percent of all their decisions changed between the initial interview and the follow-up, meaning that people who said during the first interview that they would want a life-extending treatment said during the second interview that they wouldn’t want it (or vice versa). That people would change their preferences is not terribly surprising. Perhaps they had discussed the possibilities with friends, relatives, or doctors in the