"One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place."
Emily Dickinson
In a study that was published by the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology participants viewed photographs of the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing that occurred in the 80's and the protest against the Iraq war which took place in Rome in 2003.The researchers dived into two groups people that had participated on the demonstrations; and showed to one group digitally altered images of the events and to another group the original images. The researchers discovered that the manipulation of the photos influenced the memory of the participants. In the photos that were manipulated as being violent where there was no violence, the participants even described even more violent incidents like injuries and damages that were never recorded. They discovered that misleading information and propaganda can actually alter people’s memory of the event. They conclude that very easily mass media can alter the way that we view a past event even when we have experienced it and that it can actually change they way that we view historical events.
I think that its a very interesting finding that confirms the power of the mass media and propaganda has on people. I think that another interesting thing that was not mentioned is that people sometimes tend to describe the events that they have lived as more dramatic anyway; to give emphasis as to how important their experience was. Apart from the role of mass media I think that maybe we as people tend to distort our memories as we grow older. Maybe not distorting actual events rather than its significance and impact. Moreover, we tend to suppress memories that are painful and there are times that we don't even trust our own memories and rely on others recollections.
All these is quite interesting especially if you believe like me that we are defined by our own memories.
9 comments:
What is history, if not a series of events recorded, interpreted and filtered by the eyes of an individual (or a small collection of individuals)...
History is mostly not what exactly happened but how others wrote it. I think legends used to born that way.
It's not the mass media and it's not the government or some secret plot to control mankind. To me, the concept is authority. How it manifests itself is insignificant if we want to examine its effects on perception. And you can see those effects in marriage, in friendship, in work, in the bus, at the store, quite frankly everywhere.
You can see people that are otherwise skeptics and tend to filter out the bullshit that's freely floating around them literally bend over and take one up the ass when they hear or read something on the news. And it doesn't matter what kind of bias the "news" are under. For my mother it would be the corporate media news, for my communist uncle it would be the communist party's official newspaper, for my fascist cousin it would be this or that, for leftists it's indymedia, you name it.
I reckon, the reason this happens is because the media carry an aura of authority. It's on the news so it must be true, right?
And it seems we're wired that way. Maybe not genetically but we're raised to obey and conform. Your mother tells you not to touch the stove and when you do you get burnt. Your father orders you not to go this party or that concert or what have you and when you do you get yelled at. Children get expelled or are put down if they get bad grades. Very early on this whole concept of normalcy and staying within the lines is drawn around you and so your mind, and even your body learns to conform.
Think of the Milgram experiment on obedience. This experiment included a teacher subject and a student subject. The student subject was rigged and was part of the researching staff while the teacher was a real subject. The teacher would ask a question and if the student got it wrong he was ordered to hit a switch that would electrically shock the student. For each wrong answer the intensity of the shock increased until it reached extreme levels. Almost 70% of the teacher subjects went all the way up the scale, even when they could hear the student scream in anguish and in fact even when after a point they could hear no sound at all. None of them sadistically pulled the switches. In fact all of them hesitated and objected but when the researchers told them they should continue they all did. They viewed the researchers as figures of authority the had to appease, failing to realize the simple fact that this was an experiment and the researcher had no authority over them whatsover.
Then you have the Asch experiments on conformity. You had 5 subjects that were presented a picture of a single straight line next to a group of 3 lines and they needed to identify which of the three lines is identical to the first. The subjects answered out loud one after another. Out of the 5 subjects, only the 4th in line was a real subject. The rest of the subjects were instructed to give the same wrong answer. 40% of the real subjects chose to ignore the reality and go along with the group, giving in turn the same wrong answer. When one of the four rigged subjects was instructed to provide the obviously correct answer, the real subject would in turn provide the correct answer as well. Even when the real subject was instructed to provide written answers instead of verbal ones, thus avoiding any confrontation with the group, the subject would often provide obviously wrong ones. So it's not even a matter of majority, it's the overwhelming unanimity that drowns people's individuality
What I'm saying is, I'm no expert on the subject but I don't really think it's the visual stimuli that helped distort the memories of the subjects in Ranias' paradigm. I think it's the notion that their memories are of lower authority than the (fake) evidence of the researchers. What remains a mystery to me is how one would then proceed to create vivid (fake) memories instead of just having a vague knowledge of the violence portrayed in the pictures. But I trust the mind to be so strong as to be able to create such images.
But really, I think we are engineered to conform and the depth of that engineering is so immense it can distort all layers of perception, even the mnemonic ones. And it's so well designed, our training, that it actually causes us physical discomfort to bend the rules, even a bit.
For instance, I'm writing this from work on what could be a tea break and yet I hear this voice in my head like a tape recorder droning on and on about how I could spend these 10 minutes to finish off this task or that.
And, you know, to a point, it's what we do. We adopt and we evolve. But to stay at that and look at mankind as we look at an amoeba, strictly from a sterile lab microscope, is just, you know, a terrible waste of lab time.
@apotheosis
true but its a bit scary that the recollections of an event by someone can change by presenting a false account of the event.
@gorgi
and how the media portrays it...
@khayman
An interesting perspective khayman.Authority must play a role in propaganda.But in this project there was not a media footage rather photographs and the people that presented it were researchers.Do you think that authority played a part on the research?Maybe visual stimuli can be more persuasive.I am not sure but think of the implications despite propaganda on accounts that are presented in a court room!
What I'm suggesting is that the scientific staff can often attain authoritative status in the mindset of the subject. This way, anything that might be suggested by the researchers seems more plausible.
I do realize how immensly hard it would be to perform such experiments in a non controlled environment, having an infinite amount of variables that cannot be contained in any way. But I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to research on human behavior because people act differently in a controlled environment, for instance in a lab with scientists monitoring. They almost always try to please the researchers. Why do they do that? My guess is that they view them as figures of authority, not strictly as figures of power, but moreso as figures that possess knowledge and are therefore in an advantageous position.
For example, a group of students performed the Asch experiment on random students. The results were quite different. Kids refused to conform and always spoke up their own mind. It could be because the subjects in this case did not acknowledge any authority in the researchers OR their fellow subjects.
So, to me, both the Milgram experiment and the Stanford jail experiment are to be taken with a grain of salt, because the subjects were put into a very specific mindset and were in a way manipulated into acting in a way that would prove the researchers original theory.
So what I really find interesting about those experiments is the fact that once people were pushed in a certain direction they became absorbed with the task of fitting in with the role completely and after a point their individual reality diminished and the researchers' artificial reality became prominent.
I don't really doubt the fact that visual imagery carries the power to pursuade and manipulate. I just think that the context in which they are presented is what's most important and what forms people's minds. And in the case of this experiment, the pictures were presented as a fact by a scientific group. To be in the position to try and dispute the truth of those pictures in such a situation causes some mild discomfort, don't you think? That it'd subconsiously easier to just go along with the scientists.
Αχ δεν ξέρω.. τόσα ερωτήματα.. φυσικά και πιστεύω ότι τα μέσα καθοδηγούν τις αναμνήσεις μας, εδώ εμείς οι ίδιοι καθοδηγούμε και αλλάζουμε πολλές φορές τις αναμνήσεις μας, αλλά από την άλλη δεν μπορούμε να δαιμονοποιούμε τόσο εύκολα κάποια πράγματα. Ίσως να αλλάζουν οι αναμνήσεις που εμείς θέλουμε να αλλάξουνε. Έχουμε πολλά χρόνια μπροστά μας και πιστεύω ότι θα υπάρξει μια στιγμή που αυτή η έρευνα θα είναι πιο επίκαιρη από ποτέ.. Δυστυχώς..
My take on the subject is that though one is defined by the sum of his/her memories, they tend to wear off in time and one cannot remember all the facts right in the end. That's why I constantly bring images from the past that made me happy to mind, so as I never forget them or alter them in any way.
P.S. I tend to exaggerate when gossiping (lol) but this is irrelevant hahaha
Φοβερά ενδιαφέρον
τι είμαστε τελικά;
αυτά που ζήσαμε;
αυτά που μας λένε οι άλλοι οτι ζήσαμε;
οι αναμνήσεις μας;
ο,τι τρώμε;(λολ)
εγώ θα έλεγα πως είμαστε όλα όσα είναι μέσα στο σώμα μας..
απο χημικές ουσίες στον εγκέφαλο και γονίδια μέσα στα κύτταρα (επηρεασμένα και τα δυο από όλα τα παραπάνω) μέχρι και ψυχικές ανάσες που εκπνέουμε και αναπνέουμε.
@khayman
I agree with the authoritative perspective you suggest.However, concerning photos and memories I know this is quite true.Imagine that in psychology their is a type of therapy, narrative, that uses photos to heal traumatic events that happened to someone (replacing with positive images)or even construct memory to people that have a deficit in memory.I am amazed you know all these experiments!
@sunshine
Νομίζω οτι ήταν πάντα επίκαιρη αλλά δεν το συνειδητοποιούσαμε!
@oni
Thats a nice strategy oni!
@narita
Τελικά πάντα καταλήγουμε στα υπαρξιακά μας naritaki εμείς οι δυο!
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