Posts Tagged ‘memory’
Memory and the Recency Effect
It’s tempting to think that knowing about a cognitive bias or logical fallacy makes them immune to it. I’m no exception, but I constantly find myself falling prey to the recency effect, or recency bias. The good news is that I catch myself from time to time — the bad news is that I have no idea how many instances slip through.
The recency effect describes a condition where the most recent information you learned has a disproportionate impact on your opinion about a topic. I find myself watching TV programs or reading articles where the author sets out arguments on an issue and I often think, “Oh, I didn’t know that. I’ll have to revise my opinion.” The rest of the time I think, “Yeah, right” and move on with my day. If the topic’s one I don’t know much about, the information I just learned will affect my view more than it would if I knew a lot about the issue.
As I mentioned in my review of The Gamble, published here and on Technology and Society Book Reviews, the Romney 2012 presidential campaign managers attempted to use the recency effect to their candidate’s advantage. The authors cited a significant body of research showing that political ads sway opinion, but only for a few days at most before viewers’ opinions revert to their personal baselines. The Romney campaign took out a large number of ads in the days before the election in hopes of using the recency effect to their advantage. In fact, the campaign bought the entire available ad inventory in several states. Rather than leave the money in the bank, they bought ads in states they deemed less important.
If you really want to see the recency effect in action, watch the U.S. stock markets whenever major events occur. Every bit of news causes the markets to move as investors try to out-guess each other and make a profit on competitors’ decisions. I’m not sure how much of the action is individual speculators trying to get a jump on the market and others trying to guess the reactors’ reactions (and so on up the chain), but the short-term volatility can be astonishing.
Memories Change Over Time
Memories of dramatic events seem to be burned into our minds. It seems easy to recall where we were when we learned JFK was assassinated (before my time), Ronald Reagan was shot (middle school gym at the end of the day), Elvis died (in a car near the top of Massanutten Mountain on our way to my grandparents’ place), or on September 11, 2001 (checking email after sleeping late).
It all seems so clear, but how reliable are our memories of the events and the circumstances surrounding them? Not very, especially as time passes and discussions of the events contain information not available at first. For example, a Smithsonian magazine article notes that Karim Nader, a neuroscientist, examined his own memories of September 11 and found he had made some mistakes.
Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.
These changes are normal and expected. You store long-term memories by associating new information with things you already know. As you continue to receive information about an event, it becomes difficult to distinguish what occurred when. That’s why legal experts view eyewitness testimony as unreliable – humans are fallible, our memories especially so.
When you’re an improviser, this fallibility works to your advantage. Long-form shows can run for 45 minutes or more and, given the huge number of choices performers make, inconsistencies crop up all the time. The good news is that your audience wants you to succeed and, unless the error is too big to ignore, they’re almost always willing to go along with the new reality. Not doing so would undermine their enjoyment of the show, so they have an incentive to play along.
This forgiving atmosphere isn’t present in politics and business, at least not for your competitors. They want you to fail and will bring up every instance of you ignoring or, in their opinion, attempting to mischaracterize the past. It doesn’t help when a campaign adviser admits that’s what you plan to do. As reported in a CNN.com article on March 21, 2012:
Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior campaign adviser, was asked in a CNN interview Wednesday morning whether the former Massachusetts governor had been forced to adopt conservative positions in the rugged race that could hurt his standing with moderates in November’s general election.
“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes,” Fehrnstrom responded. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
Ouch. I anticipate the Etch A Sketch will be a theme in the 2014 and 2016 election cycle. Regardless, the lesson to draw from this incident is the same for both improv and business: Don’t abuse your audience’s goodwill.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Our-Brains-Make-Memories.html#ixzz2BfHlkdVx
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/21/politics/campaign-wrap/index.html
Episodic and Semantic Memory
If I ask you to tell me what 3+2 equals, you would probably do so instantly. On the other hand, if I ask you to name in the last movie you saw the theater, you might have to think about it for a second or two. Those two different types of recall illustrate the differences between semantic memory and episodic memory.
I’ll start with episodic memory first. As the name implies, episodic memory is a form of long-term memory that records events from your life. Such episodes might include your wedding, the birth of a child, or something as mundane as getting out of a cab and stepping directly into a puddle. These episodes make up your internal autobiography, which is your personal record of your experiences.
Semantic memory, by contrast, refers to a subconscious knowledge that forms the basis for how we speak our native language, perform tasks we’ve done thousands of times, or interact in social settings. Semantic knowledge is often tacit, meaning that it is hard to quantify or describe. In many cases there is no need to write down the rules of behavior because everyone in the situation knows precisely what they are supposed to do. You’ll find this is true of families around the dinner table or groups of friends who go out for drinks after work.
Episodes from your life provide terrific fodder for scenes if you’re an improviser or for presentations in business. The trick is to find episodes that are directly relevant to your audience’s needs and to resist the temptation to stray too much from the truth. It’s one thing to tell your significant other a slightly exaggerated version of your exploits, but it’s quite another to tell an obviously untrue story in a business presentation. Conference goers have seen lots of presentations and they can smell a fake a mile away. Play it straight—don’t give in to the temptation to exaggerate too much.
Improspectives 