Why do you remember a monocle that never existed? Picture the old millionaire from the board game: in a 2022 University of Chicago study, 58% of answers picked a version with a monocle he never had. Take three memory tests and find out which of your memories you can actually trust.
In this video: the visual Mandela effect (a gold robot’s legs, a cartoon monkey’s tail, a yellow creature’s tail tip, the monocle), why people still did about as well as a coin flip right after studying the real pictures, the heard word list that makes people ‘remember’ a word nobody said, the 1974 crash films where one verb changed the speed and added broken glass, implanted memories (lost in the mall, 1995 and the preregistered 2023 replication; the balloon photo; the disputed 70% recount), flashbulb memories that keep their certainty but not their details, and the twist: first, fair, confident memories are usually right, and the damage comes after. Then the first-note move for this week. The famous icons are shown only as our own generic doodles. The 58% figure comes from 98 answers in a three-choice test, computed by us from the authors’ public data; the paper shows it only as a chart.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The monocle trap
0:53 Test 1: pick the real one
1:51 Why 58% saw a monocle
3:03 Test 2: the word list
4:15 Test 3: the crash
5:27 Whole fake afternoons
6:51 Vivid memories, and the twist
8:16 Write the first one down
SOURCES
• Prasad & Bainbridge (2022). The visual Mandela effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people. Psychological Science, 33(12), 1971. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221108944
• Per-icon shares (58% monocle from 98 answers; 75%, 72%, 52%; 27% real) are our own count of the authors’ public Experiment 1 data: https://osf.io/7cmwf/
• Clearer Thinking, Transparent Replications Report #8 (N = 389; a replication report, not peer-reviewed). https://replications.clearerthinking.org/replication-2022psci33-12/
• Loftus & Zanni (1975). Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 5, 86 (question wording). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03336715
• Roediger & McDermott (1995). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803
• Loftus & Palmer (1974). Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3
• Loftus & Pickrell (1995). Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720. https://doi.org/10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07
• Murphy et al. (2023). Lost in the mall again (preregistered replication). Memory, 31(6), 818. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2023.2198327
• Wade, Garry, Read & Lindsay (2002). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(3), 597. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196318
• Wade, Garry & Pezdek (2018), recoding Shaw & Porter (2015). Psychological Science, 29(3), 471. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617703667
• Shaw (2018). Reply to Wade, Garry, and Pezdek. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618759552
• Talarico & Rubin (2003). Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories. Psychological Science, 14(5), 455. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.02453
• Neisser & Harsch (1992). Phantom flashbulbs. In Affect and Accuracy in Recall (Cambridge University Press). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511664069.003
• Wixted & Wells (2017). Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 18(1), 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100616686966
• Wixted, Mickes, Clark, Gronlund & Roediger (2015), incl. Palmer et al. (2013) and Garrett (2011). American Psychologist, 70(6), 515. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039510
This video is psychology, not medical or legal advice.
MUSIC
“Chill Wave”, “Sincerely”, “Airport Lounge” and “Space 1990” — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Sound effects: CC0 (Freesound).
Narration voice is AI-generated. Animation, script and research are original to this channel.
#psychology #memory #mandelaeffect
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