• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

CHAPTER 3

Memory, the Self-justifying Historian

1 Quoted in George Plimpton (1997), Truman Capote. New York: Anchor/ Doubleday, p. 306. We are taking Vidal’s version of this story on the grounds that he has never had compunctions about talking about either subject—politics or bisexuality—and therefore had no motivation to distort his memory.

2 Anthony G. Greenwald (1980), “The Totalitarian Ego: Fabrication and Revision of Personal History,” American Psychologist, 35, pp. 603–618.

3 Edward Jones and Rika Kohler (1959), “The Effects of Plausibility on the Learning of Controversial Statements,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 57, pp. 315–320.

4 See, for example, Michael Ross (1989), “Relation of Implicit Theories to the Construction of Personal Histories,” Psychological Review, 96, pp. 341–357; Anne E. Wilson and Michael Ross (2001), “From Chump to Champ: People’s Appraisals of Their Earlier and Present Selves,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, pp. 572–584; and Michael Ross and Anne E. Wilson (2003), “Autobiographical Memory and Conceptions of Self: Getting Better All the Time,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, pp. 66–69.

5 Marcia K. Johnson, Shahin Hashtroudi, and D. Stephen Lindsay (1993), “Source Monitoring,” Psychological Bulletin, 114, pp. 3–28; Karen J. Mitchell and Marcia K. Johnson (2000), “Source Monitoring: Attributing Mental Experiences,” in E. Tulving & F. I. M. Craik (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.

6 Mary McCarthy (1957), Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co. “With the tin butterfly in his hand,” p. 80; “I suddenly remembered,” p. 82; “The most likely thing,” p. 83.

7 Barbara Tversky and Elizabeth J. Marsh (2000), “Biased Retellings of Events Yield Biased Memories,” Cognitive Psychology, 40, pp. 1–38; see also Elizabeth J. Marsh and Barbara Tversky (2004), “Spinning the Stories of Our Lives,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, pp. 491–503.

8 Brooke C. Feeney and Jude Cassidy (2003), “Reconstructive Memory Related to Adolescent-Parent Conflict Interactions: The Influence of Attachment-Related Representations on Immediate Perceptions and Changes in Perceptions over Time,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, pp. 945–955.

9 Daniel Offer, Marjorie Kaiz, Kenneth I. Howard, and Emily S. Bennett (2000), “The Altering of Reported Experiences,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 39, pp. 735–742. Several of the authors also wrote a book on this study. See Daniel Offer, Marjorie Kaiz Offer, and Eric Ostrov (2004), Regular Guys: 34 Years Beyond Adolescence. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

10 On “mismemories” of sex, see Maryanne Garry, Stefanie J. Sharman, Julie Feldman, Gary A. Marlatt, and Elizabeth F. Loftus (2002), “Examining Memory for Heterosexual College Students’ Sexual Experiences Using an Electronic Mail Diary,” Health Psychology, 21, pp. 629–634. On the over-reporting of voting, see R. P. Abelson, Elizabeth D. Loftus, and Anthony G. Greenwald (1992), “Attempts to Improve the Accuracy of Self-Reports of Voting,” in J. M. Tanur (ed.), Questions About Questions: Inquiries into the Cognitive Bases of Surveys. New York: Russell Sage. See also Robert F. Belli, Michael W. Traugott, Margaret Young, and Katherine A. McGonagle (1999), “Reducing Vote Overreporting in Surveys: Social Desirability, Memory Failure, and Source Monitoring,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 63, pp. 90–108. On misremembering donating money, see Christopher D. B. Burt and Jennifer S. Popple (1998), “Memorial Distortions in Donation Data,” Journal of Social Psychology, 138, pp. 724–733. College students’ memories of their high-school grades are also distorted in a positive direction; see Harry P. Bahrick, Lynda K. Hall, and Stephanie A. Berger (1996), “Accuracy and Distortion in Memory for High School Grades,” Psychological Science, 7, pp. 265–271.

11 Lisa K. Libby and Richard P. Eibach (2002), “Looking Back