300 ChaPteR 8 Memory
This is Your Life
A student once told us how for years she had
remembered falling from her bike as a young
child and being rushed to the hospital. She
remembered the concerned adults hovering
around her, the trip in the car, and especially
the blood. There was only one problem: The
injury, she later learned, had happened to
her sister, not to her.
Why had this student made herself the
central character in this story? She had
her own theory: At the time she had envied
all the attention her sister was getting,
and so later, as the memory faded, in her
imagination she refocused that attention
on herself so she could be the star of the
drama—a good example of “imagination
inflation.”
As this story illustrates, we are not
merely actors in our personal life stories;
we also write the scripts. In this chapter
we saw that although our recollections are
often accurate, they can also be incomplete
or even just plain wrong. Confabulation,
source misattribution, poor encoding, inter-
ference, inadequate retrieval cues, suggest-
ibility, and biases can all trip us up, even
when we are recalling significant events in
our own lives.
Here are just a few ways to start exploring
your own autobiographical narratives:Write down your earliest memory. How old
do you think you were? Does the memory
involve an event or just a sensory impression
(the taste of a particular food, the softness
of a blanket, the sound of your mother’s
voice)? There are probably many memories
you could have chosen as your “earliest.”
What does the one you did choose tell you
about yourself? Does it reflect your needs or
personality traits or family relationships in
some way?think about how you would relate an embar-
rassing experience from your past. How would
you describe it to a close friend? A par-
ent? A stranger? Would your narrative change
depending on the audience? If so, how?Consider whether your narratives have been
consistent over time. For example, if you
have ever broken up with a romantic partner,
what memories of the relationship did you
focus on while you were still together as
opposed to after you parted? Did you recall
mostly the good aspects of the relationship
when you were a happy couple and only the
bad ones once you split?Compare one of your memories with someone
else’s memory of the same experience. Often
people in the same family have different
memories of the same event or person. Pick
some family event—say a holiday celebra-
tion, a visit to a theme park, or a family
crisis. Find out if a parent or sibling remem-
bers it the way you do. If there are differ-
ences, why do you think that is?
Consider the central “theme” of your life
story. If you were writing your life story to
date, what would its title be? My Struggles
to Overcome Obstacles? My Life as a Victim?
Why Success Matters to Me? What does your
theme tell you about your sense of who you
are, your motivations, needs, and values, or
your philosophy of life?
As you grow older, you are likely to
remember more from your adolescence and
early adulthood than from midlife (Jansari
& Parkin, 1996). Perhaps the younger years
are especially likely to come to mind later
in life when people look back because our
early years are full of important transitions—
starting and completing college, getting a
job, falling in love. As a college student, you
will do well to mindfully encode and enjoy
the experiences you’re having now, for they
will be the stuff of memory later on.learned from personal experience what you have
learned from this chapter: Eyewitnesses can and do
make mistakes; ethnic differences can increase these
mistakes; even memories for shocking or traumatic
experiences are vulnerable to distortion and influence
by others; and our confidence in our memories is not
a reliable guide to their accuracy. Over the years,
Thompson and Cotton have made it their personal
goal to educate the public and the criminal justice
system, so that the mistake she made will be less
likely to be repeated by others (Thompson-Cannino,
Cotton, & Torneo, 2009). Their story teaches us to
respect the power of memory but at the same time
retain humility about our capacity for error, confabula-
tion, and self-deception.After Ronald Cotton was exonerated of the rape of
Jennifer Thompson, the two became friends.Taking Psychology With You