Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [39]
In Ralph Haber’s case, the distortions of memory preserved his self-concept of always having been an independent spirit. But for most people, the self-concept is based on a belief in change, improvement, and growth. For some of us, it’s based on a belief that we have changed completely; indeed, the past self seems like an entirely different person. When people have had a religious conversion, survived a disaster, suffered through cancer, or recovered from an addiction, they often feel transformed; the former self, they say, is “not me.” For people who have experienced such transformations, memory helps resolve the inconsistency between their past and current selves by literally changing their perspectives. When people recall actions that are dissonant with their current view of themselves—for example, when religious people are asked to remember times they did not attend religious services when they felt they should have, or when antireligious people remember attending services—they visualize the memory from a third-person perspective, as if they were an impartial observer. But when they remember actions that are consonant with their current identities, they tell a first-person story, as if they were looking at their former selves through their own eyes.11
What happens, though, if we only think we have improved but actually haven’t changed at all? Again, memory to the rescue. In one experiment, Michael Conway and Michael Ross had 106 undergraduates take a study-skills improvement program that, like many such programs, promised more than it delivered. At the start, the students rated their study skills and then were randomly assigned to take the course or be put on a waiting list. The training had absolutely no effect on their study habits or grades. How, then, did the students justify the waste of time and effort? Three weeks later, when asked to recall as accurately as possible their own initial skills evaluation, they misremembered their skills as being far worse than they had stated at the outset, which allowed them to believe they had improved when they actually had not changed at all. Six months later, when asked to recall their grades in that course, they misremembered that, too, believing their grades to have been higher than they were. The students who stayed on the waiting list for the skills program, having expended no effort, energy, or time, felt no cognitive dissonance and had nothing to justify. Having no need to distort their memories, they remembered their abilities and recent grades accurately. 12
Conway and Ross called this self-serving memory distortion “getting what you want by revising what you had.” On the larger stage of the life cycle, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved, to feel better about ourselves now.13 Of course, all of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think we have. This bias in memory explains why each of us feels that we have changed profoundly, but our friends, enemies, and loved ones are the same old friends, enemies, and loved ones they ever were. We run into Harry at the high-school reunion, and while Harry is describing how much he’s learned and grown since graduation, we’re nodding and saying to ourselves, “Same old Harry; a little fatter, a little balder.”
The self-justifying mechanisms of memory would be just another charming, and often exasperating, aspect of human nature were it not for the fact that we live our lives, we make decisions about people, we form guiding philosophies, and we construct entire narratives on the basis of memories that are often right but also often dead wrong. It’s frustrating enough that things happened that we don’t remember; it is scary when we remember things that never happened. Many of our mistaken memories are benign, on the level of who read us The Wonderful O, but sometimes they have more profound consequences, not only for ourselves but