Hillary and the snipers

Dan Goldstein — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:20:29 -0700

We've all seen the video:Hillary tells of landing under sniper fire. The trusted authorities who upload things to YouTube are calling it a lie. But is Hillary lying?

I don't know. I wasn't in Bosnia that day and I am rarely, if ever, allowed on tarmacs.

She is quoted as saying "I remember landing under sniper fire. There 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." It is the first six words that are drawing all the attention.

I did notice that the clip mentions one "Sharyl Attkisson", who was traveling with the first lady. After fruitless attempts searching for "Cheryl Atkinson", I was able to find that journalist Sharyl Attkisson corroborates some minor parts of the story, but recalls no snipers. The reporter also remembers no heroic, head-lowered dash across the tarmac under incoming fire; no order from the military to move fast due to danger; and no cancellation of the greeting ceremony. Instead, she remembers that the airport "felt safe" and that Clinton was greeted by dignitaries and children on deplaning. Attkisson's memory is born out by the tape. Of course, she had access to the footage before she spoke on the topic.

I looked for other witnesses. The Washington Post reports that comedian Sinbad was also on the trip, but noticed no tensions. Clinton dismissed his account because he's a comedian and that makes perfect sense. We can't expect stand-up comedians to make observations about the difference between men and women, New York and LA, silence and gunfire, etc.

It turns out that singer Sheryl Crowe (not to be confused with journalist Sharyl Attkisson or misspelling Sharyl Crowe) was another member of the entourage, but there is no word from her yet.

Was Hillary lying? Or was she just having false memories?

If you ever get the chance to hang out with a group of experimental cognitive psychologists, decline, but if you really can't get out of it then ask them for their favorite stories about false memories. The best ones are those in which someone remembers something vividly, only later to realize it could not have happened. For instance:

A man remembers being a teenager and spray painting an anti-Nazi message on a public wall in World War II Germany. He later realizes that spray paint hadn't yet been invented.

A professor remembers that his PhD examination was postponed because the great psychologist Egon Brunswik had committed suicide that very day. He later learns that Brunswik died in another year.

For the spray painter and the graduate student, these were memories, not lies. They were stories they believed, stories they had told many times, and stories that defined their lives. But they did not really happen.

False memories are not rare things. Experimental psychologists can implant them with ease. Consider this description by Elizabeth Loftus:

"To prove that false memories can be insinuated into memory by these suggestive techniques, researchers have tried to plant memories that would be highly implausible or impossible. For example, one set of studies asked people to evaluate advertising copy. They were shown a fake print advertisement that described a visit to Disneyland and how they met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, 16% of these subjects said that they remembered meeting and shaking hands with Bugs Bunny. In follow-up research carried out by Grinley in my laboratory, several presentations of fake advertisments involving Bugs Bunny at Disneyland resulted in 25–35% of subjects claiming to have met Bugs Bunny. Moreover, when these subjects were subsequently asked to report precisely what they remembered about their encounter with Bugs Bunny, 62% remembered shaking his hand and 46% remembered hugging him. A few people remembered touching his ears or tail. One person remembered that he was holding a carrot. The scenes described in the advertisement never occurred, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. cartoon character and would not be featured at a Disney property."

It's seems to me that Hillary isn't lying. She just believes something that didn't happen. I can sympathize. I mean, I believe not only the story in which Sinbad influenced the global balance of power, but also the farcical notion that a tiny entourage to Bosnia would contain both a "Sheryl" and a "Sharyl." Come on. That's less probable than Bugs at Disneyland.

Hat tip: BJ Schwartz

A tale of two selves

Dan Goldstein — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 05:18:55 -0700

Psychologists and economists love to talk about the notion of two selves: present self and future self. It's a nice way to explain the tendency to have one preference about the future, but a very different preference when the future becomes the present. On Sunday, future self might want to go to bed early on Thursday, wake up early on Friday, and hit the gym where it will listen to one hour of "Listen-and-repeat Italian" lessons while mastering the StairMaster.

However, come Thursday evening's dinner with a client, this voice cannot be heard next to that of present self saying yes to dessert, coffee, after-dinner liquer, and a postprandial visit to the pub. Sunday's voice is also asleep Friday morning, when the present self resets the alarm from 5:30 to 8:00.

In a clever April fools joke, the website www.thinkgeek.com proposed a solution in the form of an alarm clock that donates money to your most-hated cause should you hit the snooze button. Imagine giving money to a despised politician every time you slept in. Might that get you out of bed?

While the SnuzNLuz alarm clock was a joke, it was a brilliant one. I believe that someone will run with this or a very similar idea. Many future selves find their present selves to be their own worst enemies, and might be willing to pay obedience school tuition. In fact, the much-buzzed about http://www.stickk.com/ is built on this model: taxing yourself for failing to lose weight, quit smoking, etc.

I am reminded of the time I was a postdoc at Columbia University, on the job market, and deep in a publish-or-perish the phase of my career. I instituted a similar (though lower-tech) mechanism. My rule was that if I didn't write a certain number of pages each day, I would lose five dollars. I think I lost about $60 on the scheme, though it did land me a job I love.

I remember being seriously conflicted about whom to give the money to if I procrastinated. I felt that if I gave it to a good cause, I would be continually justifying my procrastination as charitable. I felt that if I gave it to a bad cause, that would be evil. I also feared that I would start justifying my procrastination by telling myself the bad cause isn't so bad. (Sound far-fetched? The idea that we might infer our preferences from our actions is a key, if not field-defining, idea from social psychology.)

In the end, I chose to leave the money on a seat on the New York subway. Maybe a good person would find it, maybe a bad person would find it, all I was certain of was regretting my procrastination. Given that you're not evil, if you found $5 on the 1/9 train around 2005, I hope that it inched you closer to your goals.

Psychology Today Blogs - Decisions, Decisions

Hillary and the snipers

A tale of two selves