Twilight News Edition 543
Edition 543, 19th September 2023
THE MANDELA EFFECT
By Fiona Jhaveri
Does Pikachu’s tail have a black stripe on it? Does Darth Vader actually say “Luke, I am your father”? Does Gandalf tell Frodo and the group to “Run, you fools!”, or is it actually, “Fly you fools!”? If you thought that Pikachu has a black stripe on its tail, Darth Vader does indeed say “Luke, I am you father” or that Gandalf says “Run, you fools!”, you are most likely experiencing the Mandela Effect.
The Mandela Effect is when you remember something that does not exactly match the historical records or is incorrect. Paranormal researcher Fiona Broome coined the name in 2009 after becoming convinced that then-South African President Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s. But Mandela did not die in prison; he was released in 1990, went on to lead South Africa and died in 2013. However, Broome noticed that many others seemed to share the same inaccurate memory, prompting further investigation.
Most of the time, when pertaining to historical facts, the Mandela Effect can happen to a large group of people. Such as when everyone believed and still does, that the evil queen from Snow White says, “Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”, when she actually says “Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”. What does Science have to say about it? Psychologists explain the Mandela effect via memory and social effects – particularly false memory. This involves mistakenly recalling events or experiences that have not occurred, or distortion of existing memories. The unconscious manufacture of fabricated or misinterpreted memories is called confabulation. In everyday life confabulation is relatively common. False memories occur in a number of ways. F
or instance, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm demonstrates how learning a list of words that contain closely related items – such as “bed” and “pillow” – produces false recognition of related, but non-presented words – such as “sleep”. Memory inaccuracy can also arise from what’s known as “source monitoring errors”. These are instances where people fail to distinguish between real and imagined events. US professor of psychology Jim Coan demonstrated how easily this can happen using the “lost in the mall” procedure. This saw Coan give his family members short narratives describing childhood events. One, about his brother getting lost in a shopping mall, was invented. Not only did Coan’s brother believe the event occurred, he also added additional detail. W
hen cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory Elizabeth Loftus applied the technique to larger samples, 25 per cent of participants failed to recognise the event was false. This collective misremembering is believed to be influenced by psychological factors like memory distortion, social influence, and cognitive biases. Inaccurate memories can spread and become reinforced within a group, creating a perception of reality that contradicts factual information.