The Woman Who Can't Forget by Jill Price Read Free Book Online Page A

remembering damaging in such cases, it also raises serious issues in regard to eyewitness testimony in legal trials. Many studies have revealed that witness recall can be substantially flawed, in part due to the way in which the witnesses were questioned or shown information, such as in a lineup of suspects. As far as I know, my memory is not susceptible to suggestibility.
    What seems to me one of the most problematic of the sins, because it is so subtle and so pervasive, is the one Schacter calls bias. This is the way that people’s memory of the past can be significantly distorted by what they know or feel in the present. These distortions operate in many tricky ways, and Schacter identifies five key types. One, called consistency bias, causes us to make our thoughts and feelings more consistent over time, so that we remember feeling the same way about something in the past as we do now, even though we actually felt quite differently then. For example, someone who initially supported the Iraq War but now opposes it might misremember having ever supported the war. An example that Schacter describes is from one study that showed that if you asked a married couple how they had felt about each other five years earlier, they would tend to describe those feelings according to the way they were currently feeling, which, depending on the state of their marriage, might be a good thing or a bad thing.
    Another category is change bias, which occurs when people think that they should have changed something in their lives or about themselves over time, and their minds exaggerate the actual amount of change that has happened. For example, if you attended an anger management class and think that you should have learned to become calmer, then you might exaggerate just how much improvement you’ve seen in your control over your temper due to the class. It’s interesting that this bias can involve not only exaggerating how much better the situation is in the present, but also how bad the situation was in the past. To use the same example, a person might also exaggerate just how bad a temper she had before the class. The mind is endlessly creative!
    One type of bias that is fairly easy to spot in friends and family is the distortion called hindsight bias, which is when people believe that they always knew something that they’ve in fact just found out about. With those who are close to us in life, this sort of rewriting of history is bound to come up fairly glaringly now and then. Say, for example, a friend who is a big fan of the Dallas Cowboys claims that he always knew they were going to lose a big game they’d been the strong favorite to win, even though you clearly remember him saying they were going to cream the other team. Schacter uses the case of the O. J. Simpson trial and how many people who had thought Simpson would be convicted said after the trial that they had known he’d be let off. Interestingly, this bias is much stronger when it seems to people, after the fact, that there was good reason for them to have had the correct view initially. If the difference in outcome seems due to a quirk of chance, then the distortion isn’t nearly as strong. So if the quarterback for the Cowboys was injured, for example, then that friend who is a fan probably wouldn’t be distorting about his prior expectation that the team would achieve a crushing victory, or at least not as much.
    A type of distortion that has plagued human life in many ways that are all too obvious is that called stereotypical bias, which has been a contributing factor in racial and gender stereotyping. What happens in this process is that preordained, general views about a category of people are projected onto individuals. As Schacter writes, “Because it may require considerable cognitive effort to size up every new person we meet as an individual, we often find it easier to fall back on stereotypical generalizations that accumulate