Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [38]
Just as our current feelings about our parents shape our memories of how they treated us, our current self-concepts affect memories of our own lives. In 1962, Daniel Offer, then a young resident in psychiatry, and his colleagues interviewed 73 fourteen-year-old boys about their home lives, sexuality, religion, parents, parental discipline, and other emotionally charged topics. Offer and his colleagues were able to reinterview almost all these fellows thirty-four years later, when they were forty-eight years old, to ask them what they remembered of their adolescence. “Remarkably,” the researchers concluded, “the men’s ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance.” Most of those who remembered themselves as having been bold, outgoing teenagers, had, at age fourteen, described themselves as shy. Having lived through the sexual revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, the men recalled themselves as having been much more liberal and adventurous sexually as teenagers than they really had been. Nearly half remembered that as teenagers they believed that having sexual intercourse as high-school students was okay, but only 15 percent of them actually felt that way when they were fourteen. The men’s current self-concepts blurred their memories, bringing their past selves into harmony with their present ones. 9
Memories are distorted in a self-enhancing direction in all sorts of ways. Men and women alike remember having had fewer sexual partners than they really did, they remember having far more sex with those partners than they actually had, and they remember using condoms more often than they actually did. People also remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in, they remember voting for the winning candidate rather than the politician they did vote for, they remember giving more to charity than they really did, they remember that their children walked and talked at an earlier age than they really did … You get the idea.10
If a memory is a central part of your identity, a self-serving distortion is even more likely. Ralph Haber, a distinguished cognitive psychologist, likes to tell the story of how he chose to go to graduate school at Stanford over his mother’s objections. She wanted him to continue his education at the University of Michigan, he remembered, where he would be close to home; but he wanted to get far away and become more independent. “My memory has always been that when Stanford offered me admission and a fellowship, I leapt for joy, accepted with enthusiasm, and prepared to head west. A done deal!” Twenty-five years later, when Haber went back to Michigan for his mother’s eightieth birthday, she handed him a shoebox of letters they had written to each other over the years. In the very first letters he pulled out, he learned that he had clearly decided to stay at Michigan and reject all his other offers. “It was my mother,” he told us, “who pleaded passionately for me to change my mind” and leave. “I must have rewritten the entire history of this conflicted choice so my memory came out consistent,” Haber now says, “consistent with what I actually did in leaving the shelter of home; consistent with how I wanted to see myself—being able to leave home; and consistent with my need for a loving mother who wanted me