The Sense of an Ending – and why we are wired to produce false memories

Studiocanal
Lauren Knott, City, University of London

How much do you trust your memories? Do you consider the events and perspectives you remember as gospel truth, or as more malleable, fickle things that bend and warp with time and shifting context?

The recently released film The Sense of an Ending, adapted from Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning novel, takes the second perspective. It explores the intriguing premise that our own views of our lives may be incomplete and even inaccurate. I research false memories, and so I was curious to see how the film matched up to my own understanding of how our views of our pasts do not always reflect what actually happened.

Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) is a grumpy retiree who owns a camera repair shop in modern day London. One morning he receives a letter explaining that he has been left the diary of his closest friend from school, Adrian, who committed suicide when they were at university. The diary has been left to him by the mother of Tony’s first college girlfriend, Veronica (Charlotte Rampling). Tony never gets to read the diary because Veronica refuses to give it up. But the bequest causes him to reconnect with Veronica, and as he speaks to her, he starts to reconsider his vision of their past.

Although we do not know what Tony believes led to his friend’s suicide, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that he is very much unaware of the repercussions of an explosively emotional letter he had sent to Adrian years ago. Indeed, we watch as Tony uncovers a complex and disturbing truth in his search for the true narrative of what led to his best friend’s untimely death.

Tony’s misapprehension centres around a false memory he has concerning the letter he sent to Adrian. As Tony recounts it, the letter gave his blessing to the new relationship between Adrian and ex-girlfriend, Veronica. But he slowly learns that the letter he wrote was instead a slur to his friend’s betrayal for engaging in a relationship with Veronica after their own break up. The letter, it transpires, led to a series of events that ended in Adrian’s suicide.

False memories

So Tony has a distorted view of his life and history. Extensive research in the field of memory distortion has shown that memories do indeed tend to alter, fade, and undergo transformation over the course of time.

We all have our own narratives of life. You have a “version” of that life that is a story you tell to yourself and others, about what your life has been. But it is only that, a story, and it is just one version of a possible number of stories. Tony realises that the version of his life that he has told himself is based on a recollection of an event that is inherently wrong. He comes to realise that the distortion of memory can change anything and everything that he had believed true for so long.

Tony’s mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory system. Fallible not just because we forget information (errors of omission) but because we also “remember” things that did not happen (errors of commission). This can be a simple case of misremembering, for example, that we had eggs for breakfast when in fact we had cereal, or sometimes, more seriously, mistakenly remembering entire events that never happened.

Memory distortions in humans may occur simply with the passage of time. This is partly because, over time, memories typically become less episodic (highly detailed and specific) and more semantic (more broad and generalised), as the information is repeatedly retrieved and re-encoded in varying contexts.

Bone chips and dinosaurs

We do this not because memory is fundamentally flawed but because it is reconstructive. That is, our memory of events is not a verbatim playback of what happened. Rather, it’s a reconstruction based on the retrieval of some stored remnants of the original experience that may have persisted in memory, along with our conceptual framework for other similar previous experiences, that serves to make the memory coherent.

Ulric Neisser, the “father of cognitive psychology”, famously likened memory retrieval to palaeontology, writing in 1967: “Out of a few stored bone chips, we remember a dinosaur.” Put simply, if we think an event should have happened in a certain way on the basis of our previous experiences, we are likely to think that the event did indeed happen this way. So memory is not simply a recording of the past. It is a deliberate piecing together of retrieved information in an effort to make sense of the past. And so efforts to recollect memories can turn out to be fatal if the recollected memories prove fallible.

But why is memory like this? Such a reconstructive memory system is designed to be very adaptive. It is likely that memory evolved not as a system that retains verbatim information about past experience but rather one that helps us understand, experience, and interpret the world around us. It works well for what it is intended: guiding current and future behaviour.

This latter point is an important one to understand when it comes to Tony. His false narration of this historical event has likely protected him from facing possible blame for his friend’s suicide. We can avoid thinking about events that may be seen as traumatic to the self, and we can direct our attention to other competing thoughts to suppress the memory for the event. A faulty or false memory has led Tony’s individual history and narrative to be imperfect. The Sense of an Ending demonstrates that when the self is constructed from memories, the self can be a false self, based on beliefs and memories that do not accurately represent the past.

That’s not to say that we should all consider our life narratives as inherently false, based on a faulty memory system. But because of the constructive nature of memory, we should consider that what we end up remembering is not always what we actually witnessed happening.

Lauren Knott, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, City, University of London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How video can help police – and the public

Mary Angela Bock, University of Texas at Austin

With three billion camera-equipped cellphones in circulation, we are awash in visual information. Cameras are lighter, smaller and cheaper than ever and they’re everywhere, making it possible for nearly anyone to watch, create, share and video.

One of the most dramatic ways camera proliferation is changing our lives is in the area of law enforcement. Dashcams have been around for years and are increasingly popular. President Obama called for local departments to start equipping officers with badge cams. Citizens, too, have cameras, usually in their smartphones, but increasingly on their own dashboards. Yet even with all this footage, we are often in the dark about what really happens during police encounters.

For the past three years I’ve been studying the police accountability movement and the role that video has played in fueling activism by citizens concerned about criminal justice policies in their communities. “Cop-watching,” as it’s known informally, cannot be understood without also studying the way the law enforcement community uses video. As a result, my work has taken me to courtrooms, police stations and city streets where citizens and police are watching each other through their camera lenses.

Multiple perspectives, one timeline

A recent research project I conducted with my husband, David Alan Schneider, showed how this worked in a courtroom. We examined the way video evidence played out in a criminal courtroom. On January 1, 2012, as a woman under arrest by Austin, Texas, police called for help, an Iraq War veteran turned activist, Antonio Buehler, pulled his phone out to photograph the scene. He ended up getting arrested himself, and put on trial for allegedly interfering with police work.

The jury watched three videos and listened to multiple versions of what happened that night: police alleged that Buehler lunged at them menacingly; he argued that he was the one assaulted. Another bystander, across the street, had filmed the scene, too, showing officers throwing Buehler to the ground. Police dashcam video showed part of the start of the woman’s drunk-driving arrest and included some of the audio. A surveillance camera from the nearby convenience store bore silent witness and showed where Buehler’s car was in relation to the rest of the action.

Three videos, three narratives, but time passes along only one line. By incorporating the other evidence into what they saw, and tying everything to that one timeline, the jury came up with yet another, constructed narrative, acquitting Buehler.

The famous Rodney King case in 1991 that acquitted four officers and sparked riots in Los Angeles shows just how important the timeline is to our ideas of reality and truth. When the video is played in real time, the scene is devastating; officers are seen swarming the truck driver and striking him swiftly and repeatedly.

But defense attorneys for the officers never played the video straight through; instead they stopped and started it second by second. With the images taken out of context and isolated from the timeline, the moments shown seemed more defensible. The jury, left with competing narratives and a set of images detached from the timeline, found in favor of the officers.

Documenting police work

Video’s combination of timeline with visual information has significant implications for the current debate about badge-cams, dash-cams and cop-watching. When it comes to really figuring out what happened, more cameras are helpful; multiple perspectives tied to the timeline present a narrative that better mimics the way we move through the world. We don’t stand in one place, like a surveillance camera, nor do we hold our focus on one spot. We look close, we scan and move. For the sake of really understanding an event, the more video, the better.

From a public policy perspective, this is expensive and complicated. Much depends on who controls the cameras and the resulting videos. Dashcams only show what was in front of the car. Like most of the video from the drunk-driving arrest in Buehler’s case, the confrontation between Sandra Bland and a Texas police officer happened outside the camera’s range. Badge-cams can show what was in front of an officer, but they come with a long list of other considerations: privacy for certain kinds of crime victims and the officers themselves; protocols for when and how to turn them on and off; storage and distribution procedures for the millions of hours of video they will eventually collect.

Citizen videos have provided some of the most dramatic and troubling evidence of police misconduct, but by nature are happenstance and the result of being on location at a particular moment. Based on my own research, it’s clear that cop-watching video only captures events of note once in a while; their work is most effective as a preventative. This “sousveillance” movement is conceived as a way for the public to monitor and keep a check on power, serving as a sort of democratized fourth estate.

Do cameras lie?

My interest in video has grown out of my first career as a TV journalist and a lifelong interest in how photography conveys reality, which is not nearly as simple as it seems. True, cameras perfectly capture the light waves from a scene in front of them in ways that we could never duplicate by drawing or painting. Cameras can provide extraordinary evidence, which is why police and crime scene investigators document everything, why journalists use cameras as documentary tools, and why citizen journalists are able to gain credibility for their own investigations.

Yet anyone who’s ever looked at photos someone else took of them at the party last weekend and thought to themselves “I don’t look like that!” can relate to the way a camera distorts and flattens a scene. There’s much more, though: Consider the way photographers work, using their own bodies to capture a particular perspective, with lenses that do what our eyes cannot, framing a scene in a way that captures certain elements but not others. Those are just some of the decisions that happen before the darkroom or Photoshop stage, when images are cropped, enhanced and sometimes distorted in misleading ways.

Then there are the ways our brains mislead us, because images work differently in our heads than language does. Pictures seem to take a faster highway, metaphorically speaking, inspiring emotional responses faster than language and its logical reasoning. They seem to work in our memories differently than words do. Add to this the way photographic images feel real, and it becomes easier to understand why images can be very convincing even when we know we’re being manipulated by special effects in a movie or an ad that shows a cupcake that’s simply too perfect to be true – but now we’re hungry.

Video offers up its own set of real and unreal characteristics. We’ve all seen the way editing can change the nature of a soundbite or a TV story; the now-discredited attack video about Planned Parenthood is a perfect example of how scenes can be deliberately distorted. Yet unedited, raw video, while subject to all the limitations of cameras generally, usually adds not just images but also audio to the timeline. Still images offer up a form of visual reality. Raw, unedited video shows us what happened in what order – and that means it provides its own version of a story.

Un-edited, raw video is a “triple threat” for public safety. It has the visual presence of photography; the power of language in its audio; and the ultimate, unyielding evidence offered by the timeline. The public must demand transparency and input for the way police and any other branch of government creates, stores and distributes it. The public must exercise its right to video police and other public servants working in public spaces. Cameras may not lie, but people do all the time. While it’s not infallible, video offers an invaluable way to find the truth.

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article mistakenly identified Antonio Buehler as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Buehler served in Iraq.

Mary Angela Bock, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why eyewitnesses give false evidence – and how we can stop them

Amina Memon, Royal Holloway

In October 2004, a rumour of a gang fight circulated on an east London estate and a large crowd of around 50 young people gathered to take part. During the melee, one youth received a fatal blow from a sharp object and the attackers fled on their bicycles. This tragedy left one young man dead and another, Sam Hallam, convicted of murder – wrongly, as it later turned out.

Eyewitness evidence lay at the heart of this case. One witness picked Hallam out of a police lineup while another identified him in an interview. Yet both these testimonies were later shown to be false and eventually – after seven years in prison – Sam Hallam had his conviction quashed and he was released. For all the importance of eyewitness testimony to the justice system, witnesses can and do get things wrong. Understanding exactly why could help us reduce the chances of further miscarriages of justice.

One obvious reason why witnesses make mistakes is that the conditions of an event may not produce very strong memories. The Hallam case provides a good example of such poor conditions: the incident unfolded rapidly, a weapon was involved, it was distressing and some of the perpetrators had the hoods of their hoodies pulled up to hide their faces. These so-called estimator variables can affect how reliable a witness’s memory is.

Memories can also be influenced by other people, for example if a witness discusses the event with someone else afterwards, particularly other witnesses. For example, Witness 1 in the Hallam case initially told police that they had seen a black man brandishing a baseball bat at the scene of the incident. Despite this, they then picked out the white male they knew as Hallam from an identification parade. In cross-examination, the witness later admitted that they selected Hallam after they had heard a rumour that he was involved.

Similarly, Witness 2 gave a detailed description of the baseball bat in their first interview but made no mention of having seen Hallam at the scene until a second interview. It turned out this was only after the rumour that Hallam was involved circulated.

Leading questions from interviewers can also plant the seeds of a false memory in witnesses’ minds. For example, when Witness 1 picked Hallam out of the police lineup, this was mistakenly treated as evidence that they had identified him as holding the baseball bat. It appears that two leading questions from the interviewing officers contributed to this misunderstanding.

This can happen when investigators have become biased against a particular suspect and focus on a single theory that fits with or confirms the evidence at hand, rather than considering alternative possibilities. On top of this, the expectations and motivation of an interviewer to get information can alter the perception and weight that is given to a witness statement.

Innocent until proven guilty?

Investigator bias may have also played a part in the wrongful conviction of Barry George for the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando. Once again, eyewitness evidence supporting the hypothesis that George was responsible played a primary role in court. The poor quality of the eyewitness evidence presented at trial was overlooked.

For example, a couple of witnesses had learned where the suspect was positioned in the lineup. They were also allowed to give evidence in the form of a partial identification, despite the fact that that they had failed to identify George in a formal video identification procedure. When witnesses talk to each other they may come to agree on what they saw, and research shows feedback from other witnesses can inflate their confidence in court.

These cases remind us that the principle that every suspect should be presumed innocent until proven guilty should apply at all stages of criminal proceedings. The burden of proving a suspect’s guilt is on the prosecuting team, who have a responsibility to ensure a fair trial and that means following procedures to reduce mistaken eyewitness identifications.

Specifically, investigators and lawyers have the responsibility to make sure individual witnesses do not come into contact with each other. But more than this, investigators should consider theories and evidence that may lead them to conclude the suspect is innocent. And where problems with eyewitness evidence do occur, the jury in the trial should be alerted. Without such safeguards, evidence based on eyewitness errors will continue to make its way into trials and more serious miscarriages of justice will occur.

Amina Memon, Professor of Psychology, Royal Holloway

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How selfies can build – and destabilise – brands

Joonas Rokka, EM Lyon

While self-portraiture is nearly as old as art itself, the photographic selfie emerged as a globally recognized phenomenon only recently, as a result of the rising “attention economy” and its growing appetite for likes, followers, retweets and fame. Google estimates some 24 billion selfies were taken in a year via 200 million Google accounts alone, which signals that the phenomenon far from being marginal.

Selfies can be taken by virtually anyone, and companies and brands have recognized the magnetic “power” in making a selfie a key element of marketing campaigns and social-media content strategies. Yet brands are increasingly aware – and often uncomfortably so – that individuals’ selfies constitute a whole new form of brand co-creation. Based on my research, I will examine how people use “brand selfies” to express their identities as complex assemblages of things, objects, and brands and how that engenders new challenges for branding.

Selfies and self-portraiture in historical perspective

The selfie phenomenon has important connections with the idea of self-portraits in fine arts that emerged in the 16th Century. Already classic works of artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt, for example, featured paintings, engravings and drawings of the artist face-to-face with the spectator. These images often featured the artist “in action” in the artist’s studio, usually holding the pencils, brushes and colour palette in hand, in order to give the impression that the image was spontaneous and authentic in nature. But it was also not uncommon to these early self-portraits that the artist posed in fine clothing and staged apparel, or that he was playfully engaging with various image genres of the time. For instance, self-portraits were often fused with historical scenes or even still-life images.

The self-portrait shares much in common with the visual genre called “snapshot aesthetic”, commonly in use in photography and commercial images, and not least in ads. Snapshot relies on the authentic feeling of images snapped “on the go” of our daily lives. As described by Iqani and Schroeder (2015), these casual, everyday images helps us narrate and make sense of our selves but also communicate our existence to those around us.

When examined in the light of broader history of self-portraiture and photography it becomes quickly clear that classifying and pathologising selfies as simple acts of narcissism and ego-play would overlook important critical commentaries and reflexivity that this visual form potentially offers. Notably, many famous self-portraits have sought out for representational agency in order to make visible issues related to power and politics, including gender, as explained by art historian Derek Murray (2015).

Yet it is important to keep in mind that the self-portrait and selfie differ in several respects. For one, self-portraits were historically rare and usually produced by the elite and the celebrated. It was not until the boom of popular photography around the turn of 20th Century that it was democratised as a key genre of image making. And it was the rise of smartphones and easy online access that made selfie an everyday and ever-present spectacle and practice.

Selfies and the rise of attention economy

The emergence of selfie phenomenon can be partly explained by peoples’ increasingly important drive for attentional capital in the forms of quantifiable likes, shares and followers. The selfie is a symptom of the attention economy, as it draws on intimate and sometimes revealing images in a magnet-like manner. As a result, “instafame” has allured celebrities and stars, rappers and gangsters, presidents and popes to take selfies, but they are not reserved just for the elite. More than 296,417,695 images have been tagged in Instagram alone, when writing this article, suggesting that selfies can be found in just about everyone’s social media profiles.

Research by Eagar and Dann (2016) identifies selfies as an important “self-branding” practice. They also point out various kinds of popular selfies that proliferate quickly, including autobiography, parody, propaganda, romance, self-help, travel, and the coffee-table-and-book selfies. Other ubiquitous trends include selfies at the gym, toilet, funeral, museum, swimming pool, in front of mirror, or alongside luxury or other objects, or while wearing a hijab – and with or without a selfie-stick.

Yet emerging research has found that selfies are not only the product of narcissism but they also may entail a feeling of being in control of one’s own expression as well as empowerment. Selfies have been considered as potent ways for negotiating one’s identity-related tensions, such those related to body ideals, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or religion – or even ways to combat censorship in countries with limited freedom of speech. Selfies have also been recognized as a powerful cultural form because of their ability to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Brand selfies and consumer microcelebrity

New digital technologies are evidently changing the ways in which meanings and identity of both consumers and brands are constructed. This is why, in my ongoing research on champagne, I decided to study how consumers post selfies featuring some of the most popular champagne brands.

By means of visual analysis of consumer-made selfies on champagne brand Instagram accounts, I was able to uncover some key dynamics that explain how the brand selfies impact and potentially contest even well-established brands, such as Moët & Chandon, Dom Pérignon, or Veuve Clicquot, the three most talked-about champagne brands online in my data. A total of 6,820 images were gathered during six weeks in April/May 2014, from which a random sample of 120 images were analysed in detail. The objective was to compare how brand account images differ from consumer-made selfie-images, which constituted as much as 40% of all brand-tagged images, to illuminate their distinct nature.

It became quickly clear that the studied brand-controlled accounts did not use selfies in their visual communications, and even the presence of people (only 25% of images on average) or faces (13%) was rare. Instead, the brands’ postings often echoed typical champagne advertising images depicting a “still life” of inanimate objects, artefacts and scenery mainly focused on the product close-up – including the brand logo (75%), bottle(s) (63%), wine (25%), and bubbles (13%). They also ensured, as one might imagine, that no other brands were present or identifiable. All attention was reserved for the focal champagne brand and its principal, historically shaped associations that most often included “heritage/tradition” (55%), “class/status” (45%), and even “magic” (22%) (see figure 1).

Consumers’ brand selfies presented sharp and visible contrast to these “official” brand images. While the appearance of bottles, wine and bubbles in selfie-images was as frequent as in the brand images, they presented a large number of human bodies (95% of selfie images and 1.5 people per image on average), with as many as 53% of the images featuring face(s). This shift in focus impacts the overall feeling of the images in significant ways. Notably, the presence of human bodies and identifiable faces break the brand’s singularity and gives it an often banalized expression.

In addition, consumers’ brand selfies were not focused on a single champagne brand, but nearly 40% of the images contained or tagged several brands at once. Instead of being focused on the brand, the selfies were systematically centred on the “self”, making the brand necessarily more peripheral (see Figure 2). More often than not, the brand was only mentioned with a hashtag in textual commentary but not visible in the image.

What emerges from the consumers’ brand selfies is an incontestable expression of what I call “microcelebrity”. This highly popular category, constituting 67% of all the consumer-made images, can be understood as a collection of visual practices and strategies that mimic celebrities’ postings aimed to signal fame and attractiveness to others. For example, common brand selfies entail “mirror selfies”, “gym selfies”, “bathroom selfies”, “bikini selfies”, and “party selfies”, in other words, “ordinary” people posing as if they were famous stars. These postings commonly joined with follower and attention-seeking hashtags such as #follow4follow”, #followme, #like4like and #pickoftheday (see Figure 3).

Above all, these findings reveal that selfies as a new form of visual self-presentation practice have come to offer alternative constructions of brands with new kinds of material and expressive features. Notably, they indicate that selfies (and the self) are becoming the nodal point at which official brand images and consumer microcelebrity assemblages intersect. This powerful shift potentially undermines stable, historically built symbolic and material properties of heritage brands, and makes visible a profound heterogeneity of alternative and often chaotic brand images – at least from the point of view of the brand manager.

New challenges for branding

Companies and marketing scholars have long understood that social media have accelerated processes of brand co-creation with customers. Yet very often this phenomenon has been considered only in terms of online consumer-to-brand or consumer-to-consumer verbal dialogues or narratives – hence, word-of-mouth – leaving the visual aspects aside. New forms of visual practices, including the selfie, force the marketers to see and re-consider the visual dimension of their co-creation strategies. The problem is that until recently, most social-media monitoring tools base their analysis on text, not images or video. We thus seem to lack comprehensive tools and even vocabulary for addressing the arguably slippery, elusive but also excessive and voluminous visual. This makes the brand managers’ tasks increasingly difficult.

Although experienced marketing professionals may have an intuitive understanding towards the visual, in my research I have hoped to offer more concrete approaches in this regard. Through visual content analysis of both official and consumer-made champagne Instagram images, I worked to understand the kinds of expressive and material assemblages of identities that the social media images construct. This allowed us to map out the focal elements that consumer-generated images – although most often arguably unintentionally – reinforce in the official brand expressions and meanings, and also those that effectively disrupt and destabilize them.

For example, it was not uncommon that the studied official champagne brand accounts, and perhaps by accident, expressed symbolic and material elements in their postings that were largely in contradiction and dissonance, at least in terms of stylistic consistency, with their historically stabilized brand vision (for example, postings with “wrong” kinds of champagne glasses, or combining champagne with “wrong” kinds of subcultural symbols).

How can companies manage brand co-creation through selfies? Despite the above-described challenges, I believe that powerfully resonant, charismatic, and meaningful brands can always play an important role in leading the creative production of social-media images and interactions. On a practical level, this could simply mean campaigns where brands teach people to take “desired” types of images with the “right” types of expressive and material ingredients.

However, the question at stake is more fundamental: a contemporary brand can no longer rely on strategies that follow a logic that aims to “control” and “own” every association and aspect about their brand. Instead, they need to embrace a whole new conception of a brand which is more “open source” by default. This means that successful brands need to allow for more diversity and flexibility in the expressions and meanings that “fit” it. An excellent example is the GoPro brand that relies exclusively on consumer-created visual communications across all of their (official) communications. In a similar manner, successful brands will need to relinquish control – at least in a much greater degree – to gain resonance with the selfie-obsessed social media world.

The source research for this article was published as “Heterotopian Selfies: How Social Media Destabilizes Brand Assemblages”, in the European Journal of Marketing, 2016, Vol. 50 (9/10), pp. 1789-1813.

Joonas Rokka, Professeur associé en marketing, EM Lyon

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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