113. Sure, I Remember That

It is startlingly easy to create false memories, especially in politics.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:31Speaker 01

  From APM, American Public Media and WNYC,

• 2:37Speaker 01

  this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Rizdal.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything. Dubner, how are you, man?

• 2:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm great, thanks, Kai. I've been thinking about you, actually, lately.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Really?

• 3:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, I've been reminiscing. I was thinking about the very first radio piece that you and I did together back at Yankee Stadium.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Yankees did him, yeah.

• 3:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  You remember? Let me take you back here, Kai.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  So here we are, and this is great, and I'm having a good time, but the game doesn't start for like an hour and a half. Why are we at batting practice?

• 3:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you remember that, Kai, yes?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  I do, yes.

• 3:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  You remember we were watching batting practice and we saw A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, hitting all those massive home runs into the bleachers?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Shocking now, huh?

• 3:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, Kai, it's funny you remember that because, in fact, it did not happen.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Whoa, no, I was there.

• 3:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  We did not see A-Rod. We were there. We did not see A-Rod hit any home runs, but you did just beautifully illustrate the topic of our conversation today, which is false memory. Thank you very much for playing.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Anytime, I'm glad to help. Please continue.

• 3:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, I got to thinking about this topic during all the roundup interviews that Hillary Clinton has been doing recently, reminiscing about, you know, she's had a very eventful term as Secretary of State. And I was reminded of another Hillary Clinton reminiscence that turned out to be a bit off. Ky, I'm interested to know if you remember this piece of tape.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  I remember landing under sniper fire. It was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead, we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

• 4:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, and the thing was, there was no sniper fire, right? That's exactly right. Hillary Clinton later said that she misspoke, or maybe misremembered. So to speak about misremembering, here is Elizabeth Loftus.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  What I love about this example is that it shows you that all that education, all that experience, all those IQ points, that Yale Law School degree, it doesn't protect you from having a false memory.

• 4:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Ky, Loftus is a psych professor at UC Irvine. She's a leading scholar in memory generally, and false memory in particular. So recently, she and a couple of colleagues, along with Slate, the online magazine Slate, completed a study. And this study was huge, 5,000 participants, and they looked into how well we people generally remember political events, okay? So what they would do is the researchers would show people photographs of various political events, but the gimmick was that each participant would see four photographs, three of them real, and then one that was doctored, okay? So for instance, George Bush hanging out at his ranch with his buddy Roger Clemens

• 5:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  during Hurricane Katrina, which did not happen. Or they'd see a picture of Barack Obama in a nice friendly handshake with President Ahmadinejad of Iran, which also never happened. But Ky, here's the amazing thing, about half the participants in this study said that they did remember the thing that never happened, okay? Here's Elizabeth Loftus again.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Many individuals wrote in details that expanded upon just the claim, "I remember seeing this photograph, I remember seeing this photograph of President Obama shaking the hand of the President of Iran." And they may even tell you something about the feelings they remember having at the time they saw that photograph for the first time. But of course, they couldn't have ever seen it before because it was completely made up with Photoshop.

• 6:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's crazy, man. It is crazy. Honestly, it gets crazier. And the crazier part speaks to how partisan we are, our country. And I'm not just talking about the politicians, but the rest of us, too. So what Loftus and her colleagues did, they did a follow-up study, and they found that Democrats and Republicans remembered different fake events very differently. Which is to say, a Democratic voter was much more likely to think that the picture of Bush and Roger Clemens was real. And similarly, or conversely, a Republican was more likely to believe that Obama had really shaken hands with Ahmadinejad.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  And one wonders why Washington is in the state it is in, right?

• 6:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's depressing. I mean, you could say that we do a lot of it on purpose, but you could also argue, based on this, that maybe a lot of it is just the way we're hardwired to root for our teams. I will tell you this. The research also suggests that there may be a way to improve, however, this gridlock in Washington, as long as you're willing to engage in a little bit of trickery. What I'm thinking, Kai, is this-

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Washington, never.

• 7:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  How about this? A nice doctored photograph, you and I could put this together, of President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner maybe shooting skeet together, I'm thinking.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  We totally could.

• 7:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or how about the two of them at a ballgame in Yankee Stadium, just like you and I were there, although, you know, the more I think about it, the less sure I am that you and I were actually ever at Yankee Stadium at all.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  I was there, dude, I was there. Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. That was pretty cool.

• 7:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks, Kai. Thanks for having me.

• 8:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. My Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt has studied crime for years, including gun control, which is why he thinks most of the new gun legislation won't do much of anything.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  If your goal is to limit the amount of damage done by guns, then, given the fact that guns are a durable good that will work for 50 or 100 years, you can't have policies that only affect new guns. If you have a stock of 300 million guns, it doesn't really matter what you do with the new guns if you don't do anything with the guns that are already out there.

• 8:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  On the next Freakonomics Radio, how to talk about guns.

• 8:55Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 9:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 9:58Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 10:36Speaker 06

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