… and their many failings
(c) 2018, Davd
What memories — of yours and of others’ — you believe; tells me more about your attitudes, dislikes, and likes, than it tells me about past facts.
Much of the Kavanaugh controversy involved whether, or how much, to believe old memories. My impression of the fraction of the controversy i read, from news websites mostly, is that one cannot be close to certain what to believe. The whole big fuss qualifies better as Soap Opera than as politics, much less as good judgment or credible review.
The same applies to reports i read and hear from individuals, whether spoken or written. Acquaintances1 and correspondents remember what is consistent with their attitudes and prejudices, much more than what conflicts with them.
Most people who don’t deliberately get scientific about it, are believing what they want to believe … a set of phenomena called “Selective attention”, “selective perception”, and “selective recall.” I learned about them as a university student in the 1960s, and in ways that make me likely to remember those three phenomena better than the media and politicians remember their adolescent sex lives.
I have lived more than 70 years; and in the spirit of “web log”, will write mainly about my own memories.
My earliest definite memories are of a telephone number and an address, both from where i lived through Grade 3 or 42. I used both the address and the telephone number many, many times as a small boy. They were established in memory by repeated use, not by trauma nor even drama. I am quite convinced i remember them accurately.
Another early memory, from Grade 7, is of my locker combination that year3. That was the first year i had a locker at school; its combination was the first such set of numbers i had to memorize. Like the first telephone number i learned, I am quite convinced i remember it accurately.
I don’t remember my second telephone number, nor my second school locker combination, any longer. (I do remember my current telephone number, of course: I am still using it.) My farmer friend Stan MacDonald has made his license plate [letters, not number] easier to remember: EEIEIO4.
The first point to remember is something that all too many people, some of them famous, have forgotten or ignored: Remembering specific events years after they happen is not easy, even if they were traumatic or otherwise special — perhaps especially if they were traumatic. The second is that what we do remember best for decades on end, are early, often repeated things like telephone numbers, addresses, and locker combinations..
I remember that the year i turned six, i was frighteningly lost on a beach near where my parents were looking for a summer cabin to rent. I do not remember the beach — how steep it was, or whether it was rocky, for instance — nor do i remember about recovering from a ruptured appendix that same year, which illness and surgery prevented me from having to return to the beach where I got lost. The traumatic aspects of both experiences — long forgotten; while my Mother mentioned getting lost to me several times, probably dozens, and i have some kind of duty to remember the fact of the appendectomy when filling out some bureaucratic forms.
A ruptured appendix and that day i got lost, were both traumatic, and the details of both, are forgotten. My readily remembering an address and telephone number that were as routine as anything in a child’s life, and forgetting the details of two very dramatic experiences, one that lasted a few hours at most and one that lasted days to weeks, is entirely consistent with what Loftus et al found and Nathanson and Young summarized:
“… violent events actually decrease the accuracy of memory. Memories are weakest when associated with either low levels of arousal (such as boredom or sleepiness) or high levels of arousal (stress or trauma). [Nathanson and Young, 2006:15]
I suppose that now, having read a little about the Kavanaugh controversy and more about memories, and having thought seriously about my childhood memories for a while, i would be skeptical if somebody tried to help me fill in details of the experiences of getting lost and recovery from an appendectomy 70 years ago… or of more recent experiences.
Sometimes judges and juries are not skeptical enough. A prim, proper friend who is presently a “snowbird”, having sworn vehemently to me before going South, that he has never taken cannabis into his body, said that he is aware of people in Saskatchewan who were convicted of child abuse based on false memories. A parallel phenomenon was cited by Nathanson and Young (2006, ch. 1).5
Nathanson and Young wrote:
“It was only in the late 1990s that psychiatrists themselves began to challenge the whole theory of recovered memories.” [13]
“The parents of the patients were accused of having worshipped the Devil, in other words, of being witches according to the definition of that word held in old Salem. … There was only one
major difference between this witch hunt and those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the people accused and destroyed by unverifiable allegations were usually men, not women.” [14]
Dramatic and traumatic memories are not therefore better; the evidence seems rather to be, they are therefore factually worse.
Many years ago, a lawyer advised me to keep a diary. I have done so, not perfectly but well enough that many, many facts i observed and experienced are now written down, as remembered hours, a day or two, perhaps only minutes after the events.
I have looked up matters of fact in the diaries of past weeks, months and years, often; especially when preparing for medical appointments.6 I have looked up when the same apple trees blossomed in different years, when the first lettuce, peas, beans, and tomatoes were ready in a particular garden, when fishes came into a particular stream to spawn.
When doing research that might be worth publishing, i “of course” make notes at the time of, or immediately after the events that are becoming data. That is “proper data collection”; it almost goes without saying. The lawyer’s advice was advice to treat my personal life more scientifically, though i doubt [s]he thought of research — rather, of credibility in court. That advice, which i suppose many lawyers tell their friends and clients, confirms what Loftus and her colleagues found and Nathanson and Young discussed.
What memories you believe, tells me more about your attitudes, dislikes, and likes, than it tells me about past facts, unless you discipline yourself to be accurate.
Keep good notes — and don’t believe memories, especially old, dramatic, and-or traumatic memories, based on unaided recall. Well, you might safely believe old addresses, telephone numbers, the names of schools you attended, that sort of thing.
“Believe her” is almost tantamount to saying “Be on her side of the conflict.”
References:
The Economist Daily Chart, 2018. “After a year of #MeToo, American opinion has shifted against victims“. The Economist, Oct 15th. (Survey respondents have become more sceptical about sexual harassment.)
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Notes:
1. So far, i do not notice that friends or kin are more or less accurate than persons i know less well. Enemies? That question introduces a complication: Arguing over memories, especially if they involve Feminist doctrines, may indeed make enemies; it is less clear if it reconciles any. (Christian readers may notice a parallel with Matthew 10:34-36.)
2… and i do notice, that i cannot remember for sure which of two years i moved from the “old neighbourhood” to the part of town where i lived until i graduated from Grade 12.
3. I am not telling the telephone number nor the locker combination because i might use them someday as passwords. They are very strong memories, that nobody else is likely to remember. The school might have held the locker combination linked to my name while i was in Grade 7; the next year, they doubtless linked that same combination to whoever got that lock, that year. The telephone number, similarly, was re-issued to somebody else after my parents moved [with my sister and me] to a house located in the territory of a different telephone prefix.
4… which of course follows “Old MacDonald had a farm…” in a famous children’s song. Unlike a locker combination, license plates are public, so i can publish his, here.
5. I spent 3-4 hours one evening reading the Innocence Project and related websites, to collect notes and documentation. Those websites record hundreds of wrongful convictions, and witness error is a common but not the only cause. What i found is not enough in amount or organization for me to comfortably publish a summary: All i should declare is that false memories have led to false convictions of crime (and a fortiori, to erroneous civil court judgments, since civil courts [in the British Commonwealth and the USA, at least] use a less demanding standard of proof.)
6. Medical professionals often make a distinction between signs, which they observe (and usually note down within a minute), versus symptoms, which the patient tells to them. Signs are more trustworthy. Symptoms from a diary, if more than a day or two old, are significantly more reliable than those remembered without notes made near the time.
