Psychology 101: Intro to Psychology

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With all the information we learn and process every day, it can be difficult to remember things accurately. Because of this, our memory can become distorted. In this lesson, we'll learn how our brain can trick us into falsely remembering details of our past experiences.

Imagine you're going on vacation to Hawaii. You've never been to Hawaii before, but you've been to the beach loads of times. You know you'll need flip flops, bathing suits, sunscreen and a good book. How do you know all this? You have a schema, or a set of expectations, for what a trip to the beach is like. You've never been to Hawaii, but your past experiences at the beach help you figure out what you need for your upcoming trip.

Schema is a fancy word used to explain how you organize information. Anytime you have a new experience, your brain unconsciously slots it into an existing schema. For example, if you're shopping at a new grocery store, you use your schema of grocery stores in general to help you find the peanut butter and milk.

Schemas are incredibly important to helping you make sense of everything going on in the world. If you had to start from scratch every time you entered a new store, you'd never get anything done! Unfortunately, schemas can also cause problems. Sometimes, you might think you remember things that didn't actually happen because those things are in your schema. If you always buy your peanut butter in aisle three but the new grocery store keeps the peanut butter in aisle four, you might have trouble remembering what aisle the peanut butter is in. Your schema says aisle three but the grocery store manager says differently!

Schemas can also cause problems because information is coming from too many places. Have you ever known something to be true but forgotten where you heard it? This is called source amnesia, and it means that you remember the information but have no idea where it came from. This can happen anytime you're getting information from lots of different places. Maybe you're searching for the best ticket prices to Hawaii, and you check all of the major travel sites. You've found the perfect tickets, but forgot to bookmark them. Source amnesia makes it hard to remember where you found the cheapest tickets. You can remember all the details about it - except where to buy them from.

As I've said - schemas are essential to helping you make sense of everything you hear and see every day. But don't trust your schemas too much! Sometimes our memories can be changed if we receive some new information about an event. For example, if you spill a glass of water on your friend while lounging on the beach, she'll just get a little wet. But if you're talking about it later and say that you broke the glass, your friend might think she remembers seeing broken glass in addition to getting wet. This is called the misinformation effect, and it happens all the time when people are telling stories or anecdotes. If you tell a story over and over again, you might change the details a little bit every time. But watch out - the misinformation effect might actually cause you to remember the wrong version of the story. You might think that would never happen to you, but studies have found that a certain number of people truly believe stories that never actually happened to them.

Sometimes, we even modify our schemas to change how we feel about things. Let's go back to your Hawaiian vacation. Maybe you were choosing between a trip to Hawaii and a trip to the Florida Keys. You thought about your trip for months and simply couldn't decide. The plane tickets cost the same, the hotels were the same, and the beaches were just as beautiful. Once you've decided on Hawaii, though, you might start to remember your decision differently. If enough time has passed, you might remember the decision between Hawaii and the Keys as being much easier than it was at the time. Your brain might decide that Hawaii is a much better vacation destination, even though you had such a hard time making a decision. This is called choice-supportive bias, and it's the brain's trick to make you feel better about your decisions. Your brain is smart - it knows that it needs to do something so you don't ruin your vacation by obsessing about the Keys, so it eliminates the cognitive dissonance or irritation you might have about picking someplace that might not be paradise.

To review, all of the schemas that you've created over your lifetime help you make sense of the new things you experience every day. You don't have to start from scratch every time you go to a new beach or grocery store. Unfortunately, schemas and memory play tricks on us. Source amnesia makes it difficult to keep track of where information came from. Where did I find those tickets again? And the misinformation effect can make us remember a shattered glass even if we only spilled a little water. The choice-supportive bias is tricky, too, even if it's just your brain's efforts to help you feel better about your decisions. In the end, if you really want to remember all of the details of your Hawaiian vacation, just say cheese.