When we store events in our memories, we tag them with keywords. Was the roller-coaster ride exciting, or scary? Was the dip in the pool cold, or invigorating? Then when we encounter a similar situation, we run a quick keyword search of our memory to help us interpret the new event. Whether you go on the roller coaster or jump in the pool depends on how you tagged these experiences last time.
This gets more interesting when you consider that we all use different keywords. These keyword tags become part of our reality, and thus our “realities” differ.
Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed this by forcing their own keyword tags onto subjects’ memories. They had subjects watch video of a car crash and then asked them to estimate the cars’ speeds. But the sneaky experimenters phrased the question five slightly different ways: 1. About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? 2. About how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other? 3. About how fast were the cars going when they collided with each other? 4. About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other? 5. About how fast were the cars going when they contacted with each other?”
And so they tagged subjects’ memories with the keywords “hit,” “smashed,” “collided,” “bumped,” and “contacted”. Subjects’ estimates when tagged with “smashed” averaged 9 mph faster than their estimates when tagged with “contacted.”
Even spookier, though, is that this tagging didn’t just affect people’s estimates about the crash; it seemed to change their memories of the event as well. A week later when Loftus and Palmer asked subjects if the crash had produced broken glass, those whose memories were tagged with “smashed” said yes more often than those whose memories had been tagged with “contacted.” For, of course, a smash breaks glass while a contact doesn’t.
Loftus also looked into how the male and female memories differ. She found little difference in the amount of data men and women are able to remember. But (as you’d expect) she found very significant differences in what we remember. Male spatial memory is better and women are better at remembering faces and at tasks requiring verbal memory. Period.
Interestingly, the details that men and women best remember match stereotype. Eyewitness memory studies show that men remember the type of car, while women remember attributes of the driver. This stereotyping extends further: Men better remember “male-oriented” items (the gun), while women remember “female-oriented” items (the dress).
Loftus recommends “considerable caution” when attempting to explain these gender differences—do we blame biology or culture? In addition to (or instead of?) a physiological component, Loftus suggests that we remember what we most notice and that this is partly determined by what we’re expected to notice—boys grew up playing gun games—and so at least in part, stereotype creates culture and culture creates gender-specific memory.