Re: Where were you when... ?

tfmichael1 · Sat, 22 Apr 2000 21:25:49 -0700

Matt979 wrote:

"I'll always remember where
I was when Kurt Cobain died (April 1994): At
College Park, Maryland, asleep the night before ACF
Nationals. Also that night, Kent Mercker pitched a no-hitter
against the Dodgers, the game in which Chan Ho Park made
his major league debut as a reliever.

There is
some set of people who, when asked where they were
when the feds seized Elian Gonzalez from his home
(April 2000), can now answer: At College Park, Maryland,
asleep the night before ACF Nationals."

These
types of memories are called "flashbulb memories" by
researchers after the characteristic that they are memories
of a specific event of an instant that created
strong and lasting feelings or emotions. Examples of
events that create such memories include the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of the Kennedys and
King, and the murder of John Lennon. The death of
Cobain would certainly qualify.

Two very good
studies done about ten years apart by separate
researchers found the same interesting phenomena about these
types of memories. Each study involved taking a cohort
of people at the time of an event (the Challenger
explosion and the O. J. Simpson verdict, respectively) and
asking them where they were and what they were doing
when they heard the news. Individuals were asked this
either the day of the event or within 24 hours of the
event. The individuals in the cohort were then tracked
down several years later and asked the same
question.

In both studies, about 1/3 of the respondents had
very accurate recall of where they were when they
heard about the event, about 1/3 had memories where
some details were right and some details were wrong,
and about 1/3 had memories where nearly all the
details of where they were did not match at all with what
they wrote at the time. Both studies also asked the
respondents to rate how certain they were about the accuracy
of their memories of the event, and both reached the
same conclusion: there is *no* correlation between
certainty of accuracy of a memory and the actual accuracy
of a flashbulb memory.

In other words, people
absolutely certain that their memory was accurate were just
as likely to be totally correct as they were to be
totally wrong. And people very unsure about whether or
not their memory of the circumstances in which they
heard the news was correct were also just as likely to
be totally correct as they were to be totally
incorrect.

The above is a bit off-topic, but I find it
interesting. Full citations of the studies (one published this
year) available through private email on
request.

Tom