Seeing something we didn’t see (Sagan)
March 31st, 2008 | Published in Psychology, Truth, Quotes, Religion
The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has found that unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to believe they saw something they didn’t. In a typical experiment, subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being questioned about what they saw, they’re casually given false information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to, although there wasn’t one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully recall seeing a stop sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remembered the sign. The greater the time lag between viewing the film and being given the false information, the more people allow their memories to be tampered with.
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 139.