Memory Tricks
Everybody’s favourite Rottweiler, Mr Leiter (maybe it’s Dr Leiter; then again…), cites some Harvard Law professor talking about his experiences of teaching G. W. Bush.
Here’s some of it:
[Bush] was totally the opposite of Chris Cox. He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.
[In a discussion of government aid for retirees, Bush] “made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘The government doesn’t have to help poor people — because they are lazy.’ I said, ‘Well, could you explain that assumption?’ Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, ‘No, I didn’t say that.’
Whatever memory-pill the Harvard Prof has been taking; I want some of it. I used to find it difficult to remember what my students had said five minutes previously, let alone thirty years after the event. Admitttedly, I didn’t encourage them to talk too much. Well, at all, really.
But, in the spirit of democracy and mass participation, here’s a task for you all.
Rearrange the following words in the correct order:*
Memory
Reconstructed
*Okay, I don’t want to claim that these memories are necessarily false. But really, at least a modicum of wariness is sensible here. It’s all just a little too convenient…
Yeah…I saw a teaser for that Salon article somewhere yesterday (or the day before – my memory, tsk) and decided not to bother looking at it, for precisely the reason that memories of someone who taught Bush in B-school thirty years ago just didn’t seem likely to be worth much. With the quotations it sounds like those very bogus memoirs that are full of long passages of dialogue from when the memoirist was four. Time for skepticism.
I despise the George W Presidency (have never met the man personally, so except for a feeling of “ick” (the same feeling that sleazoid beloved of the left, Clinton, gives me, btw) I would never say whether I despise the man himself), but this kind of argument is merely preaching to the choir so that opponents of GWB can feel smug about disliking him.,
Besides which (damn I’m being a yeswoman again, I’m fulfilling Chris’ prophecy, oh rats, but I did think of this and I want to say it, dammit) it just sounds so generic. It sounds like what one would expect the man Bush is now to have said then, if one were being kind of plodding and unimaginative. It sounds, in fact, far too generic to be convincing. ‘Yeah and you know what else, he said “Let’s grind the faces of the poor.” While wearing a top hat.’
I can imagine the professor remembering a student saying things along these lines–but I can’t imagine the professor remembering which student said them, if you know what I mean. Student horror stories always seem to float free of the student; I couldn’t attach any of my own anecdotes to a student’s name, and I’ve yet to met someone who could. Of course, this man may just have a perfect memory, but…I doubt it.
“It sounds, in fact, far too generic to be convincing.”
Well that’s partly the reason that it reeks of reconstructed memory. It fits much too nicely.
What’s odd about this is that you’d have thought that the Harvard prof. himself would have the nous to doubt his own memories. This stuff isn’t rocket science (though admitedly it probably is beyond your average philosophy prof).
“I can’t imagine the professor remembering which student said them, if you know what I mean.”
Yup. It’s a thought that crosses my mind (and presumably other people’s) often – that my favorite teachers loom very large, but I don’t loom very large to them, because I’m just one of an immense crowd.
“you’d have thought that the Harvard prof. himself would have the nous to doubt his own memories.”
And the urge to report them. You would think he’d realize they’re not very credible.
Yeah? Well, I don’t doubt the accuracy of the good professor’s memory. I myself have a very distinct recollection of George W. Bush, back in 1974 (when I was one year old), taking my candy away. The man’s wickedness knows no bounds, I tell you!
Not to mention that summer of 1984 when he told his daughter she could not date foreigners, pointing to me.
But he retracted that afterwards & does lover our children dearly, I hasten to add.
Hmm…but presumably this would date from around 1975 when he did his MBA at Harvard(?).
Since his dad:
“…entered the House of Representatives in 1967…served as ambassador to the United Nations from 1971-1972, was chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1972-1973, chief of the U.S. liaison office in Peking from 1974-1976, and director of the C.I.A. from 1976-1977. In 1980 Bush campaigned for the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency but withdrew later to support Reagan, who chose Bush as his running mate.”
Could we not conclude that you just -might- remember what this reasonably well known man’s son was like?
“Could we not conclude that you just -might- remember what this reasonably well known man’s son was like?”
So that a person’s testimony could be considered reliable?
No.
I taught the niece of Michael Howard when he was home secretary (in a very small class). I can remember vaguely what she was like, but the idea that I’d trust my own memories of specific conversations with her is absurd. And this was only ten years ago.
The point is that people shouldn’t trust their own memories. You must know all the stuff that’s been done on eye-witness testimony, for example…?
Aren’t you over egging just a little? We can all trust our own memory reasonably well. On the other hand, we have good evidence about its limitations. After all, if you tell me you talked to Dawkins and he said such-and-such, I believe you…
The question is whether he is constructing a memory in retrospect or actually has always remembered that Bush’s son was a bit like that. The witness testimony stuff doesn’t tell us one way or the other.
No, I’m not over-egging it. It’s about whether we can remember reliably after 30 years. And we can’t. I have memories of chatting with Dawkins; but even here – and it’s only about five years ago – I think these memories are becoming contaminated by time.
This story reeks of reconstruced memory because it fits so precisely with how the Left (and other people) likes to think about Bush. I’m not saying that they’re wrong to see him the way that they see him. But I am saying that given that they do see him this way, this kind of testimony is highly dubious.
That surely isn’t a particularly contentious claim…
PM
I don’t really have time to get into this stuff. But very briefly, here’s what Aronson says about memory:
“Remembering is a re-constructive process. It is not like playing back a tape recorder…instead, we recreate our memories from bits and pieces of actual events filtered through and modified by our notions of what might have been, and what should have been, and we would like it to have been […] If historians revised and distorted history to the same extent that we do in trying to recall events from our own lives, they’d lose their jobs.”
(From “The Social Animal”, p. 117).
JS, I’m well aware of the constructive and reconstructive nature of memory. But I think, if i may be so bold, that you are making a very relativist move, claiming that evidence that memories can be unreliable in some circumstances undermine memories in general (and then apply this generalisation to the case at hand).
I don’t deny that the story has a whiff of reconstructed memory (although I’d go more for story-grown-in-the-retelling) but you seem to dismiss it as self-evidently so, as if any memory by someone you don’t agree with can be dismissed by appealing to the eye-witness testimony literature (which is a bit more complicated to apply to this kind of situation than you make out).
The initial quote is “I don’t remember all the students in detail unless I’m prompted by something. But I always remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong social values, compassion and intellect — the very rare person you never forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are totally the opposite….”
“as if any memory by someone you don’t agree with can be dismissed by appealing to the eye-witness testimony literature”
Sorry PM, but this is just rubbish. I keep saying how *my* memories are unreliable, so I don’t know what you mean by “someone you don’t agree with”.
And, anyway, who says I don’t agree with the guy? You think I like Bush?
And this is about *reliability*. It isn’t about whether these memories could be right. Did you read my last three sentences?
To be honest, I don’t know what the argument is here. If you don’t think that “a modicum of wariness is sensible”, then fine. But I do. And the evidence is on my side, not yours (as you’ll know, since you know about this stuff).
JS, obviously I’m mostly arguing for the sake of it…but…
You claim that “you’d have thought that the Harvard prof. himself would have the nous to doubt his own memories.”, that “people shouldn’t trust their own memories” and that “this kind of testimony is highly dubious”, “And the evidence is on my side, not yours”.
Now I know that there is some evidence that you can contaminate memories with details provided after the event (hair, clothes colour etc) – it is even possible to implant memories of false events in people if you try hard enough (and more worryingly, some people are suggestible enough to believe or say almost anything without much work), although these are usually childhood based (because of the interest in recovered memories).
But nowhere have I seen evidence that people are likely to just make up historical events in their adult lives based on their political (or other) beliefs (assuming this Harvard bloke is anti-Bush/Democrat). Elizabeth Loftus only got something like 14% of people to say they’d seen Bugs Bunny at Disneyland when they were kids after showing them “a fake print advertisement that described a visit to Disneyland and how they met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny” (bearing in mind you’d expect 5-10% of them to say it anyway).
So all I’m saying, is that you can quite rightly doubt the reliability of the recollection, but I can just as easily suggest that it might well be accurate in general – in particular i highlight that the professor claims to particularly remember Bush because he stood out in some way.
Frankly, I’d be more convinced by you saying he’s probably just making it up (in a slightly less egregious, self-deluding way) rather than appealing to memory research.
Hmm…may be on to a loser with this one:
http://s88172659.onlinehome.us/2004/07/interview-with-yoshi-tsurumi-bushs.html
Okay, well let’s first deal with whether or not people can just come to false memory. Loftus was an expert witness at the trial of a guy called Timothy Hennis (he was accused of a particularly brutal murder).
It’s a long story, but there was a witness called Sandra Barnes, who when first contacted by the police said that she had definitely *not* seen anyone (i.e., Hennis) at a cashpoint machine near the scene of the crime on the day of the murder.
During Hennis’s trial, Barnes testified that she had in fact seen somebody at the cashpoint machine that day; someone looking like Hennis.
Lying? Well that’s not what people concluded. Invented memory (to do with repetitive questioning by police, etc).
So it at least seems possible that we can just invent memories (if one accepts this analysis, but since you cited Loftus…!).
More evidence. Ross et al: a group of students received a message telling them how important it was to clean their teeth. Later the same day, in an apparently different situation, a whole group of students, including the sub-group who had received the teeth cleaning message, were asked how many times they had cleaned their teeth in the past two weeks. Needless to say, the group who had seen the message recalled cleaning their teeth far more often than those who hadn’t.
Back to Bush.
Surely, you’re not claiming that there is no evidence that memories can become distorted after this amount of time (i.e., thirty years); just to give one example, if you ask people which way they voted in an election which occurred just a few years ago, then what you find is that many more people remember voting for the winning side than the number of votes the winning side actually received.
But anyway, there’s a wealth of evidence out there about things like self-serving bias, etc., which suggests that judgements, memories, etc., are infected by our attitudes, beliefs, etc.
My position is:
a) Thirty years is too long ago that any memory is *reliable* (though some memories will be true);
b) That’s especially the case if we’re talking about a situation like remembering one student;
c) That people have hugely negative attitudes towards Bush which are likely to infect all kinds of judgements they make about him (so you know about the ‘halo effect’, right);
d) Consequently, reconstructed memory is more than a theoretical possibility in this particular case;
e) But that doesn’t necessarily mean that these memories are not accurate (my suspicion is that they are not, but my argument is simply that they should be treated with caution).
Well rather than continuing this discussion about memory, based on that link I gave, I reckon the most difficult thing to rule out is that he is just providing convenient anecdotes to support a political view of Bush (see the difficulty he gets into when talking about him being drunk).
S: ’73-74. Now when we left. I posed the question to you. I would not let you answer. How many times did George Bush come drunk to your class, as a student?
(silence)
S: He’s counting on his fingers. He’s counting
G: Hangovers count as well, because sometimes there is residual.
T: Well certainly he missed quite a few.
S: He missed quite a few classes?
T: And when he came to classes some times he stays half-drunk.
G: But wait, we said at the being that his attendance was good.
Crosstalk
T: But, but he I would say never, but he rarely came to class prepared. It’s easy, he has to come to class after he read a least some assignments or thought about some of the question and other things. Then he goes into all kinds of ranting and the flippant statements to cover up his shallowness.
S: That’s called confabulation. Which he still actually has a problem with. So to be fair to George Bush, we can not prove that he showed up to class drunk all the time.
T: Not all the time, no.
S: Right
G: But he was probably hung over when he was…you know what I mean he’s hung over. It’s college, that’s normal we can not hold, and graduate school, that just normal drinking especially in that era.
T: Well, he was rare even among the 85 students that I had, and he often had a binge drinking problems.
G: Right, but he’s got the severe leaning disability too. He’s probably frustrated because he doesn’t read very well.
T: Yeah. On top of that. On top of that.
PM
Yeah. Well I can tell that you don’t believe any of that any more than I do!
:-)
I’m reluctant to suppose that people are simply making things up; mainly because I think it’s a lot easier to tell untruths if you can come to believe that they are actually true.
I like the counting fingers bit – ‘one, two, quite a few…’ – I don’t think I’d want him teaching me microeconomics!
I’ve often wondered about the untruths thing, particularly in relation to people like Blair, but also some individuals that I know.
I’ve often got the impression that, as opposed to those people that are massively suggestible (you know the type, the ones that will always fall into the 5% of people that answer ‘yes’ to, ‘did you meet bugs bunny at Disneyland?’ – the ones hypnotists pick on), the people able to convince themselves that something happened/is right etc because they want to do it/believe it work in the order [desire for something to be true]->[belief that it is true], in essence justifying the truth of it to themselves -after- they’ve made it up, a sort of double-think distinct from suggestibility and confabulation.
PM
I’m sure your last paragraph is interesting, but I couldn’t unpack it!
I think there might be a clause missing! :-)
Hah, I scoff at your inferior parsing heuristics!
Basically, re: “I’m reluctant to suppose that people are simply making things up; mainly because I think it’s a lot easier to tell untruths if you can come to believe that they are actually true.”
I think that the massively suggestible (false memories) are distinct from those, able to come to believe things that they would like to be true. Particularly those, like Blair, that seem to do it retrospectively. These people seem to be able to convince themselves that something is true even when, initially, they only adopted it as a sort of position of convenience, that is they can create self-justifying beliefs after the fact.
“that is they can create self-justifying beliefs after the fact.”
Hmmmm!
I’m not sure. This is (obviously) an empirical question. It’s very difficult to make judgements about what politicians really think (because of the exigences of power).
A classic example I can remember is Michael Hesletine the weekend before the 1997 general election saying on the radio that not only did he think that the Tories were going to win easily, but he had revised his expectations about their majority upwards as the election campaign had gone on.
Then in his autobiography he suggested that he knew all along that they were going to lose…
So had he lied?
It just isn’t easy to say.
Obviously with Blair we’ll probably never know – its just my take on the man, informed by experience of fundamentalist christians on the one hand, and early-career ideology-lite excessively-hyphenated lawyer-politicians on the other.