![]() We found that visual features like color and brightness could not explain the effect. What causes this shared false memory for specific icons? Even when people saw the correct version of the icon, they still chose the incorrect version just a few minutes later.Īnd when asked to freely draw the icons from their memory, people also included the same incorrect features. We found that this false memory effect was incredibly strong, across multiple different ways of testing memory. Wilma Bainbridge and Deepasri Prasad, CC BY-SA Most participants in the study not only chose a wrong version of the popular cartoon character, but they also chose the same wrong one – the Pikachu with the black tip on its tail. The correct version of Pikachu is the one on the left. Put together, it’s clear evidence of the phenomenon that people on the internet have talked about for years: The visual Mandela Effect is a real and consistent memory error. In addition, participants reported being very confident in their choices and having high familiarity with these icons despite being wrong. For these seven images, people consistently identified the same incorrect version, not just randomly choosing one of the two incorrect versions. ![]() In the results, which have been accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Sciences, we found that people fared very poorly on seven of them, only choosing the correct one around or less than 33% of the time. There were 40 sets of icons, and they included C-3PO from the Star Wars franchise, the Fruit of the Loom logo and the Monopoly Man from the board game. One was correct and two were manipulated, and we asked them to select the correct one. To see whether the visual Mandela Effect really exists, we ran an experiment in which we presented people with three versions of the same icon. The visual Mandela Effect, which affects icons specifically, was a perfect way to study this. There has been very little research looking into the Mandela Effect as a memory phenomenon.īut understanding why these icons trigger such specific false memories might give us more insight into how false memories form. The Mandela Effect became fodder for conspiracists – the false memories so strong and so specific that some people see them as evidence of an alternate dimension.īecause of that, scientific research has only studied the Mandela Effect as an example of how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. The Fruit of the Loom logo has never had a cornucopia. These include names like “the Berenstain Bears,” a children’s book series that is falsely remembered as spelled “-ein” instead of “-ain,” and characters like Star Wars’ C-3PO, who is falsely remembered with two gold legs instead of one gold and one silver leg. Since then, examples of the Mandela Effect have been widely shared on the internet. The concept of shared false memories spread to other forums and websites, including Reddit. She realized that many other people also shared this same false memory and wrote an article about her experience on her website. ![]() The term “Mandela Effect” was coined by Fiona Broome, a self-described paranormal researcher, to describe her false memory of former South African president Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Recently, we have shown these similarities in our memories even extend to our false memories. However, research we have conducted shows that people tend to remember and forget the same images as one another, regardless of the diversity of their individual experiences. That’s partly because they assume that what they remember and forget ought to be subjective and based on their own personal experiences. People tend to be puzzled when they learn that they share the same false memories with other people. We call this phenomenon of shared false memories for certain cultural icons the “visual Mandela Effect.”
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