Words & False Recollection

Sometimes, I see images or quotes posted on the Internet, and I fear that people will take them to be the truth just because they’re catchy.

Words can’t be forgotten? Yes, they can, and usually they are. This is common knowledge in psychology, so I won’t bother citing any sources except for a single example. The “citing-a-particular-instance” approach is also taken from psychology; people tend to care more about single instances rather than statistical trends, even though you can’t draw any general conclusions with a single instance. But, as I said, people forget words all the time. A famous example of this is John Dean’s Watergate testimony, in which he gave very detailed, verbatim accounts of his conversations in the White House. The problem was that what he remembered having been said did not match what was actually said.

Even if we don’t remember exactly what was said, and even if we think we remember the gist of what was said, we could be wrong, and in remembering inaccurately, we could make it harder for ourselves to forgive because we might remember the words said to us as being harsher than they really were.

In a somewhat related note, it’s really cool the using priming techniques to make people remember words that weren’t really presented. For example, someone might present you with a list of words suggesting candy, say, “sweet, caramel, chocolate, sugar, lollipop,” etc. Though the word “candy”, in this case, wasn’t actually presented in the list of words, the other words will make you think of candy and so you are likely to mistakenly remember the words “candy” being on the list of words presented to you.

I do advise you, however, to be careful with the words that you say. People’s memories aren’t perfect, but human memory is really quite good for what it is. So be careful what you say, especially if a recording device is on. Be even more careful with what you write, because even if the written word is forgotten, it remains in its published form on paper (or whatever medium) to be revisited by your readers.