Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [37]
By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villains, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If one part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: You mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent—the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders.
Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories. Once we have a narrative, we shape our memories to fit into it. In a series of experiments, Barbara Tversky and Elizabeth Marsh showed how we “spin the stories of our lives.” In one, people read a story about two roommates, each of whom did an annoying thing and a sociable thing. Then they wrote a letter about one of them, either a letter of complaint to a housing authority or a letter of recommendation to a social club. As they wrote, the study participants added elaborations and details to their letters that had not been part of the original story; for example, if they were writing a recommendation, they might add, “Rachel is bubbly.” Later, when they were asked to recall the original story as accurately as possible, their memories had become biased in the direction of the letter they had written.7 They remembered the false details they had added and forgot the dissonant information they had not written about.
To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: If your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative depending on what is happening in your life now, then it’s all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently. “A few years back I found a diary that I wrote as a teen,” a woman wrote to the advice columnist Dear Amy. “It was filled with insecurity and anger. I was shocked to read that I had ever felt that way. I consider my relationship with my mom to be very close, and I don’t remember any major problems, though the diary would suggest otherwise.”
The reason this letter writer doesn’t “remember any major problems” was identified in two experiments by Brooke Feeney and Jude Cassidy, who showed how teenagers (mis)remember quarrels with each of their parents. Adolescents and their parents came into the lab and filled out forms listing typical topics