Buying In - (Page 52) 52 rob walker our memories, maybe having gotten there gradually without us ever really thinking about it. The academic research on false memories is extensive. Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, has done groundbreaking work on varieties of false memory, some of it involving eyewitnesses in legal trials who are shown to have remembered things wrongly. Other research has demonstrated instances of a “memory shift” (remembering having held a particular opinion you didn’t have, when subsequent events have made your original point of view look bad) that happens without our knowing it. One overview across eight studies found that on average, 31 percent of participants produced false memories. And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that conclusion. People even “remembered” seeing the first plane striking the World Trade Center on live television, when of course it was not broadcast live. The relationship between commercial persuasion and memory has been a theme in the work of Kathy Braun-LaTour, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Her dissertation at the University of Iowa concerned how advertising affects memory, and some of that research (later published in the Journal of Consumer Research) revolved around a series of tests involving subjects tasting different sorts of orange juice and then sharing their memories about it later. The taste of the different juices was altered by, for example, spiking them with some vinegar. Subjects each tasted one of the juices, which they were told was a new brand called Orange Grove. Later, half of the subjects were shown advertising material suggesting that Orange Grove tasted great. (This was presented as a slightly different task, in which they were supposed to offer Orange Grove’s nonexistent brand managers
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