Most of us are confident of our memories. Yet, when it comes to important events, our memories might be less reliable than we think. Here is an example from The New Yorker of a study which vividly illustrates this point.
“The day following the explosion of the Challenger, in January, 1986, Ulric Neisser, then a professor of cognitive psychology at Emory, and his assistant, Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.
In the fall of 1988, two and a half years later, the questionnaire was given a second time to the same students. It was then that R. T. recalled, with absolute confidence, her dorm-room experience. But when Neisser and Harsch compared the two sets of answers, they found barely any similarities. According to R. T.’s first recounting, she’d been in her religion class when she heard some students begin to talk about an explosion. She didn’t know any details of what had happened, “except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching, which I thought was sad.” After class, she went to her room, where she watched the news on TV, by herself, and learned more about the tragedy.”
I see this phenomenon playing out in my business practice. People begin to argue about an important event from the past. Both parties are convinced that their memory of the event is accurate and the other person has a poor memory, is lying, is crazy, or all of the above.
What is happening here? It seems that when we are emotionally charged up we experience a sort of tunnel vision. Our mind discards all of the crucial details and seems to focus only on the emotionality of the event.
What are the implications of this for those of you in leadership positions?
- When you hear two people in a major dispute, consider that neither party may be remembering the event accurately.
- It is best to challenge your own confidence in how accurate your memory is of an emotionally charged event. Though you may be sure you’re remembering accurately, know that you are subject to the same distortions as everyone else.
- Three, rather than dwelling on what happened in the past, it is best to move the discussion to what can be done in the present to resolve the conflict.