The Ministry of Truth

[lillibet]

For those of you who took the quiz on political events that I posted about last week, the results of the quiz are available here. Those of you who didn't participate may also find the results interesting.

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

It was an interesting test. I did feel like my actual memories were much less precise than what they were testing, though; I remembered "Republicans" but I couldn't have told you DeLay; I remembered that there was flak after the debates about Cheney's daughter being mentioned, but didn't remember the exact debate or who was complaining (and I am kind of embarassed to admit that I probably wouldn't even have been able to summon up Edwards' name as Kerry's running mate). So... I don't end up feeling like I ended up with *false* memories, so much as I had poor fuzzy memories which could have encompassed any number of precise examples, one of which would be true and many of which would have been false.

(For example, a tester could likely get most people by giving an example a true event and a slightly altered date; does that mean that they really have a false memory of the thing happening on the different date? No, it just means they don't *remember* the date...)

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree. Mostly I was able to pick the shaking-hands photo as the false one because I think it would come up every time the subject of American-Iranian relations is an issue, so the memory would be fresher and stronger.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Yeah: this was my experience, too. (Also coloured by not living in the US for the last decade, and my primary news source being paper, not video, which means images are much less often something I recall.)

I couldn't possibly have told you that it was Tom DeLay in that photo, because I have no idea what he looks like. I remember Bill Frist (who was claiming authority on the basis of his MD) claiming she was healthier than her doctors said. But I didn't remember DeLay being involved, too. Similarly, I didn't remember Colin Powell talking about nukes at the UN; I remembered him talking about chemical weapons.

I also kind of wish that the experiment that Slate was trying to perform hadn't been obvious from the structure of the original article. *shrug*