Without memory, the human creature would have to go about the world relying exclusively on its instincts. It would repeat mistakes, revisit bad places, obeying only the calls of the present. Memory is a mighty tool to use to utilize the advantages and avoid the pitfalls of a given environment. To take a trivial example, a person who made a sufficient sampling of one little street, would know afterwards which are the good restaurant there –– based on remembered experience of the food, atmosphere, the good nature of the staff –– and which only look good on the outside, and behave accordingly; namely, go to eat at the good restaurants. The importance of learning this environment is attested by the modern educational primary and secondary systems which concentrate almost exclusively on the acquisition of knowledge of this environment: its ‘natural’ aspects (math, physics, biology etc.) and the cultural (language, history, literature etc.). However, another progression of a more abstract understanding of the environment occurs throughout life which is overlooked by the formal education system beyond preschool, and which can roughly be viewed as “personal maturity”. This progression is termed “ego development” (Hy & Loevinger, 2014) and concerns the recognition of the self’s place in the context of The Other, as well as that of the complexity of reality and of other people. This progress is conceptually divided into discrete stages, the first several of which are usually surpassed by adulthood, and the highest levels of which are attained only by a minor fraction of the population. Not taught in school, ego development can be facilitated by loss when appreciated and elaborated on as life’s hard lessons instead of brushed away or repressed (King & Raspin, 2004; King & Hicks 2006, 2007). The process by which it happens involves reconstruing the meanings of past events with growing complexity, which is inevitably dependent on the memory of said events. Less conspicuous from this environmental learning is that memory serves people also to familiarize themselves with their own self – body and mind. “Know thyself” is not vapid even if taken as an imperative in its most literal sense. People are not born knowing who or even what they are, but learn it over time. It’s more evident in the early years of a person’s life: when someone leaves her hometown to move to a different city at, say, the age of 30, it will be evident to her how she must learn anew the features of her new city; but all of us house the same body (brain and its emergent mind included) from birth to death, the changes to it are mostly imperceivably slow –– especially past adolescence –– and it is only through some great alteration such as the result of an accident, neurological disorder or possibly a particularly stirring event that we change to such an extent that we have to relearn ourselves like we would have a new locality after moving. Otherwise by adulthood we have a good sense of who we are –– it seems to us –– and only rare edifying glimpses, if we are lucky, show us angles of us we were yet to see. The brain offers great adaptability to the individual. However, the genes that design it are blind to the environment into which it will emerge. Is it the desert or the icy tundra of the north? Is the environment scarce in resources, or abundant? The human creature is ubiquitous in the world precisely because of its ability to adapt to different environments by employing proper strategies, as opposed to other animals who are more specialized and therefore restricted. But it is not only the environment to which the genes are blind; they are also blind to the workings of the rest of the genes that are responsible for the body and its functions. Humans may not be born as Locke’s tabula rasa, but they also are not born fully operational like many other large mammels. To use a modern metaphor, the human device comes with a basic operation system and it is only after being taken out of the box that the latter detects where and what it is and downloads all the appropriate updates according to device’s specific components. Over our lifetime we’ll learn what our body is capable of, what we are good at what we are bad at, and we’ll learn our emotional response to different perceptions and impressions (Kopp, 1989).
But this memory of ours is not a perfect tool. Despite the assumptions of many bygone centuries, plenty of recent research has shown that the human memory is not completely faithful. Indeed, numerous experiments have shown that large portion of the population is susceptible to the induction of false memories. That is, experimenters are capable of making subjects “remember” events they had never experienced (Wade et al, 2002), or change the content of an existing memories (Loftus, 1977) inside the lab environment. But this phenomenon is not limited to these lab-bound cases, which are followed by a debriefing and are therefore harmeless. Loftus (1993) discusses and critiques the wide emergence of people who “unearth repressed memories” of sexual abuse by parents or other people during therapy, or other alleged memories of being a witness of a crime such as murder. These instances are often followed by litigation and conviction of possibly innocent people. But beside the harm inflicted on other people –– whose lives at times can be completely ruined by the false accusation –– it undoubtedly does some sort of harm to the misremembering person. It’s possible that those who suddenly “misremember” an abusive father had a bad relationship with him to begin with, but what if it was otherwise, and now, post the suggestive therapy, a relationship with a parent was ruined? Does this false memory further reinforce the notion of wide spread incestuous abuse in society? And if so, would it elicit a suspicion in a current husband if it arises while there are young children? Even in the individualistic Western nuclear family society, “family” is a value, and this value can be thus unjustly harmed.
I would like, in this essay, to suggest a thought experiment of sorts. Our memories are a cherished private domain which shapes our identity as well as our personality. Given the evidence of memory’s fallibility and susceptibility to falsification by others, I’d like to investigate the possibility of a person’s personality to be vulnerable to alteration by others via false memory induction. Is that possible? Should we be worried of such threats?
Before we begin, let us review what a personality is. McAdams and Pals (2006) put it as follows: “Personality is an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature, expressed as a developing pattern of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and integrative life stories complexly and differentially situated in culture.” Embedded in this description are three somewhat hierarchical levels of personality (McAdams and Pals, 2006):
- Dispositional traits. These are broad individual differences in behaviour, thought, and feeling that account for general consistencies across situations and over time. Interindividual differences in traits are relatively stable over time. These are well captured by “The Big Five Personality Traits” (Digman, 1990). They are mostly genetically predetermined, though culture plays a role in the way they are expressed. The five dimensions are: Neuroticism (unsecure, easily upset, and emotionally unstable) vs emotionally stable, Extraversion (talkative, assertive, and energetic) vs introversion, Openness (fantasy prone, creative, and independent-minded) vs closedness to experience, Agreeableness (sociable, trustful, and good-natured) vs antagonism, and Conscientiousness (orderly, responsible, and dependable) vs lack of direction (John & Srivastava, 1999).
- Characteristic adaptations. These are more specific motivational, socialcognitive, and developmental variables that are contextualized in time, situations, and social roles (e.g., goals, values, coping strategies, relational patterns, domain-specific schemas, stage-specific concerns). Some characteristic adaptations may change markedly over the life course.
- Integrative life narratives. These are internalized and evolving life stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to provide a person’s life with identity (unity, purpose, meaning). Individual differences in life stories can be seen with respect to characteristic images, tones, themes, plots, and endings. Life stories change substantially over time, reflecting personality development.
While the first, dispositional traits, are mostly allotted at birth, and their expressive dependency on culture is based on a very distributed memory, the other two levels –– characteristic adaptations and life narratives –– are very much bound and dependable on memory. To take the famous case of H.M who undergone a lobectomy in an attempt to cure his epilepsy and suffered as a consequence a deep anterograde amnesia and temporally graded retrograde amnesia, we can subsume that his dispositional traits were left unchanged, or at least whose change was an effect of the removal of subcortical structures such as the amygdalae and not a consequence of his amnesia. However, his life narrative has stopped to develop because of the andrograde amnesia, and also took a few steps back due to the retrograde one; the life narrative is absolutely dependable on autobiographic memory as building material. His characteristic adaptations face a similar fate; while his behaviour didn’t change, he became incapable of making new adaptations. It is true that he is capable of new learning, such as the learning of motor skills (Corkin, 2002), but it is not sufficient. Since this learning was done under amnesia he actually had no recollection of getting better at the task, and was therefore unlikely to engage in it (even if it was something more useful than drawing mirrored figures, as in the experiment). A person’s skill is not a part of a person’s personality. A tendency to play the guitar or going for jogging is a part of one’s personality; playing the guitar well or being a good runner is not.
Before we delve into a more theoretical exploration, let’s review some examples of operations that are somewhat reminiscent of personality alteration via memory manipulation. One example is “implosive therapy” that was used to treat PTSD of veterans of the Vietnam war (Keane et al, 1989). The therapy involves evocation of the traumatic memories in the safe and supportive environment of the clinic in order to mitigate the pathological response. Indeed, one can see the disorder as a characteristic adaptation to the brutally hostile environment of the war, an adaptation that is maladaptive in the context of social civil life. A sufferer of PTSD can be viewed as a person undergone a personality change, and the therapy, via manipulation of memory, is applied to readjust it, to make the person less anxious, and consequently less depressed and hopeless. This example differs from what we are looking for as it does not involve the “insertion” of a new memory per se. Given recent discovery of memories’ instability at recall (Lee, 2009), one can view the implosive therapy as displacing the old traumatic memories with new memories that are identical in episodic content, as it were, but differ in their present relevance and meaning (i.e. the shellings were horrible, but it doesn’t matter anymore), thus changing their affective valence and effectively removing their provocative aspect. However, this new almost identical memory lacks the novelty and fictiveness of actual false memories that I am interested in here. Another example from the therapeutic world are the techniques of reframing and relabeling of paradoxical psychotherapy (see Weeks and L’Abate, 1982, pp. 103-111). As with the aforementioned “implosive therapy”, we have here merely the changing of an aspect of memory, not a creation of a new fictive one. In this case, what is changed is the meaning of remembered things: actions, behaviours, intentions, interpersonal interactions. The change in meaning is done in such a way as to lead the person (or the system in which he or she is a part of, such as the family) to change his/her behaviour in some desirable way, as a result of a readjustment to the new understanding of the situation. Another difference between this and an alteration via false memory induction is that the memory that is shed by the new light of reframing/relabeling is somewhere at the border between episodic and semantic memory (depending on the case), though it might not be a helpful distinction to make in this context. A potential example outside the clinic comes from family life. Some parents (as well as other older relatives) may tell their children about things they had done in the early years which are beyond the children’s memory, and which might have a greater or smaller effect on the way they perceive themselves. A timid teenager might view her shyness differently if she is told that as a toddler she was cheerful and approaching. Or perhaps such a story about the origins of an on-going behaviour might lead to a reframing of its meaning, leading to change. It can be assumed that some parents might fabricate intentionally or not, possibly with a certain agenda, such stories –– making it a “false memory facilitated personality change” par excellence, assuming the child is not incredulous and appropriates the story as memory –– but even when the stories are true, since these memories were never experienced as first-hand, or at least before the storytelling, they are an external insertion, and therefore in some sense, false.
Why should something like an alteration in personality occur in consequence to an induced false memory? Many people can remember moments in their lives that were defining. After those events happened, they learned something about themselves, or they learned something about the way they can behave in the world. Few experiments had already gone in that direction. Bernstein et at (2011) demonstrated that adults who were led to believe that they had become sick as children after eating certain foods such as strawberries, were consequently avoiding them, while false memories about a good experience with a certain food led to prospective preference. While this change of behaviour seems merely trivial, as a pattern of behaviour it falls under our definition of “characteristic adaptation” and hence under the domain of personality. What’s astonishing about this is that this fabricated memory has an effect despite of all the intervening years between the putative age of “experiencing the false memory” (say age 8) and the age at which the memory was induced (age 25, for example) during which interval the person was likely to having eaten the food in question and formed a “real opinion”. Furthermore, other experiments replicated the results with alcoholic drinks, and it can be argued that this is more consequential than attitude towards broccoli. First, because improper drinking behaviour can ruin individual’s lives as well as families’, and second, because alcohol consumption itself has an effect on the consumer’s behaviour, and thus its up- or down-regulation will have a significant effect.
When people reflect spontaneously about their own personality or in response to a statement made by somebody else such as that they are kind, smart, honest, proud or cruel, if they are to look past the desirability of the praise or the affront of the reproof, they necessarily have to withdraw to their memory to try to either verify or falsify the statement. They must go through a series of pertinent autobiographical memories, judging each under the light of the statement, collecting evidence in favour and against it and come up with a general verdict, or a qualified one: perhaps the person sees himself as a generous in general, but he acknowledges that he incidentally had happened to behave frugally whenever in the presence of the statement maker, understanding why the person thought “incorrectly”. However, given that memories can be induced, what if the memories that one draws from this kind of personal evaluation are not real? A person who is not particularly generous can be induced a memory of giving a large sum of money for a stranger in need, and that one false memory might lead her to think otherwise. This, in turn, might possibly lead her to be more generous in the future, in an effort to sustain her virtue of generosity in her own eyes via self-affirmation (Steele, 1999). But a false memory can also affect future behaviour in a more complex way than through a preservation of an idea of the self. It can give one an idea of the interaction between self and environment, suggesting a certain propensity as advantageous in the person’s current behavioural ecology. For example, a person who otherwise might be naturally expressive of his emotions might be induced a memory of having been ridiculed by others at an instance of crying. While the memory involves only a particular set of observing people, he might generalize that “crying is bad” and exert self-control in the future to prevent himself from repeating “this mistake”. If those future instances of self-control prove “successful”, this kind of behaviour might turn into a habit, and the person might become “less expressive of sadness”, and if the generalization went further, perhaps even become broadly more stoic or even apathetic. A characteristic adaptation was thus induced by the memory. Or let us think about a more elaborate and possibly consequential example. Say we have a person that had had a past romantic relationship that had ended detrimentally. What if a memory, or a series of memories, “belonging” to the finishing period of this relationship, is induced, suggesting that the person was very attached to his partner who betrayed his trust? Or even ended the relationship because he was “too clingy”? Or, in the other way around, ended the relationship because he was too selfish and not committed enough? “Remembering” this, this person might engage with a different mating strategy in the future, treading more cautiously next time lest he becomes too involved too quickly on what might prove to be unreliable. Or, in the latter case, try to be more committed lest another good match is unfortunately missed.
A question that can be asked is, who is susceptible to such a personality alteration? It seems like certain dispositional traits come with greater susceptibility. First, it seems like people who are high on openness are more susceptible to the required induction of false memories, if we are to suppose that Hyman’s Creative Imagination Scale is correlated with the big five openness trait like Gough’s Creative Personality Scale (McCrae, 1987; Hyman and Billings, 1998). It seems like people low on extraversion are more susceptible to the induction of false memories by high extraversion interviewers, suggesting a social negotiation between the two parties is involved in the fabrication (Porter et al, 2000). People low on conscientiousness were also more susceptible (Hyman and Billings, 1998; Sigurðsson, 2003). However, people high on openness might be more susceptible to the whole operation owing to another mechanism. It was found that high openness people were more likely to reflect on their memories for self-defining purposes and more likely to direct their behaviour with accordance to these memories, i.e. use memories of the past to solve problems at present (Rasmussen and Berntsen, 2010). While there is an interaction between the three levels of personality of dispositional trains, characteristic adaptation and life narrative in everyone (more on that below), it seems like the openness dispositional trait has a “meta role” of sorts (Rasmussen and Berntsen, 2010). It renders the life narrative more complex on the one hand, and makes it a more frequent object of rumination on the other, which sets it to be a more important part of the personality. Indeed, the life narrative does not involve just the remembered past, but it projects and plans the life narrative into the future (McAdams and Pals, 2006). But, furthermore, it facilitates the assumption of new behaviours based on memories (or the life narrative, one could say) –– and, if I might speculate, also based on the imagined future. That is, besides affecting the kinds of characteristic adaptations that are taken up by the person like all dispositional traits (Roberts and Robins, 2000), it actually increases the rate of (new) adaptation. Rasmussen and Berntsen (2010) had also found that the neuroticism dimension is correlated with a preoccupation with memory of a negative valence, as well with self- and identity-defining function. The former correlation suggest that while highly neurotic people would not be generally more susceptible to personality alteration via false memory induction, they will be specifically more susceptible to false memories of a negative nature. One could imagine that this implies that as far as false memories might change an individual’s personality, it would be easier to bring highly neurotic people to become more cautious and timid, than outgoing and lively. On the other hand, it’s also possible that if significant memory replacement is possible (“editing” an old memory and replacing it with a fictional version, rather than “adding” a new false memory; Loftus, 1977), then a person high on the neuroticism dimension who had a stressful life would be a good candidate for “relief of wariness” via systematic editing of those memories which were the originators of the present avoidant personality. The latter correlation, that of neuroticism and the identity-defining function of autobiographical memory, suggests that neurotics perhaps are somehow still more likely to succumb, as it were, to the procedure, than non-neurotics, in general –– that is, not just with association of negative false memories. The self-defining function, which relates to how a person sees one’s self, is still one step away from actually behaving differently following life narrative recollection (which is captured by the “directive” function of the memory; Rasmussen and Berntsen, 2010), but it can still have an effect. For example, perhaps after a false memory is induced to a neurotic it changed how he saw himself, but not his behaviour. But it’s possible that some future event will lead to a characteristic adaptation as a consequence of this new identity. To take a droll example, let’s suppose that a subject of ours was induced a memory of once climbing the cupola of an old high cathedral in Romania, at the top of which she felt dizzy and afraid, and could barely bring herself back down the rickety iron steps. Let’s say that this memory doesn’t have a directive influence: back in her hometown she still goes up the familiar tall features, knowing from experience that she had never felt ill at ease when going up there. However, let’s assume that this memory did have an identity effect, and she consequently sees herself as an acrophobe, a person with fear of heights. Then one day she sees an interview on youtube of some respectable looking loony that suggests that meditating once a day for half an hour is a sure cure for acrophobia. She, just a half a year away from a planned trip to hike up and down the mountains of South America, sees it an imperative to get rid of her phobia and become a dedicated meditation practitioner. For completion sake, it can be mentioned that Rasmussen and Berntsen (2010) had also found an association between extraversion and a social function of autobiographical memory. The social function “involves the usage of memories, when we share memories with others in order to facilitate communication and social bonding.” (Rasmussen and Berntsen, 2010) Under the present premise, the social function, if not irrelevant than it is contrary to “our cause”. If the false memory involves other acquaintances, it is more likely that extroverted individuals would bring it up in conversation with them, which might lead to their denial of the validity of the memory, and hence of the confidence of the extroverted person in it. If, however, we imagine a more elaborate protocol in which several people are induced a common false memory, then any extraversion amidst those people might strengthen the effect, as the conversation between the “rememberers” will solidify the memory via elaboration. Indeed, in this case the rememberers assume in a sense the role of the interviewer in false memory induction experiments, and when high in extraversion, are more effective (Porter et al, 2000). Given the existence of extroverts in any society, one can indeed imagine that it was helpful in what was a major alteration of society’s behaviour (and personality?) in, say, Stalinist Russia, as in the Orwellian, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Indeed, given the above, it seems like the best candidates for this personality alteration are people high on openness and neuroticism (and possibly low on extraversion), and that the best candidates for a successful false memory induction are negative, fear and avoidance memories. How it relates to the success of totalitarian regimes’ propaganda, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
What kind of personality alteration can be rendered with false memories? Already above we mentioned dietary preferences, including the more significant habit of alcohol consumption. We can wonder if this putative technique can help with substance abuse. It is likely that in some cases it could be effective, but it is questionable whether it can help with severe dependency on highly addictive substances such as heroin. Indeed, it seems like some addicts know that “they have a problem”, hence voluntary submission to rehabilitation programs and institutes. The effect of false memories is likely to work on a cognitive level, while the desire for another dose emerges as a physical need, repudiating any authority of thought. It is only the most inveterate ascetics who could lead themselves to die of hunger willingly, denying themselves the responsiveness to their hunger’s call, where most others will succumb to the call. However, there’s another way to look at it. It’s likely that heroin addicts see their problems as a side effect of their habit, rather than as a direct consequence of the substance they consume. Obese people might also believe that they “should not eat that extra piece of cake”, and consequently eat it anyway. If the obesity is a result of the intake of specific food or foods (say sweets), then the procedure conducted by Bernstein, Pernat and Loftus (2011) can be directed at these foods to diminish the “eating problem”. However, they had found that the procedure was more successful when directed at rarely eaten foods, independent on how desirable they are. It is probable that the reduced effectiveness with commonly eaten foods is due to the fact that the false negative memories (food poisoning) are vying against a wide array of pleasant memories. This is a main concern, since a person is likely to become obese from commonly eaten foods, which are exactly those that are difficult to uproot. But perhaps it’s possible to do so still, with a sufficient amount of false memories? Even if it so, it remains an open question whether the same can be done with highly addictive psychoactive substances.
As already hinted on before, it seems like induction and reduction of avoidance is possible with false memories. It’s plausible to argue that fears affect an individual’s personality. A person’s fears and lack of restrict his possible actions, and therefore behaviour. A person with a stage fright is obviously somehow limited, and it is possible that this acquired disposition would evolve into additional behaviours of avoidance of self-display in public, such as dancing or singing at a party, or getting involved in a loud or violent confrontation in the street between strangers. A person with fear of heights or fear of water would be restricted in her movements, where she can go, and in some social activities such as canoeing or hiking mountains. We would recognize the engagement or disengagement with such acts as properties of a person’s personality, and would call the former timid and the latter a coward. However, these dispositions are not set in stone. Otherwise, people would not have gone to psychologists about hydrophobia or social anxiety and so on. It seems that this aspect of a person’s personality is easy it to manipulate with false memories due to their self-fulfilling prophecy nature. A memory of danger will induce an aversive behaviour which will prevent the person from finding out that the fear is unsound. This is true even when the negative consequences of the behaviour are conspicuous; acutely shy persons are not cured of their diffidence simply by becoming aware of it. Therefore, inducing a false memory of a negative consequence of boldness (being ridiculed after dancing at a party; being gossiped about and ostracized by a community after asking out a girl on a date) might endure. On the other hand, inducing a false memory of safety will lead to an engaging behaviour such as unbashfully speaking in large companies or starting a hobby of dirt biking, and as long as the person’s abilities are sufficient (such that they do not produce foolishly stifled speeches or run into mortal danger with a motorbike), it seems like the seeded false memory of safety will endanger more real memories of safety, consolidating the behaviour. It’s probable that one of the Big Five personality traits will influence to a degree the success of this endeavour: neuroticism. Nervous people are better candidates for fear induction while people low on in that domain would be more easily “persuaded” about safety (see Costa and McCrae, 1994).
Can criminals be creates through false memories? Quite astonishingly, Shaw and Porter (2015) were successful in inducing richly detailed memories of committing a crime (theft and assault) during early adolescence after three sessions in 70% of their experiment subjects(!). The false memories included a memory of a subsequent police contact (and, of course, all subjects were debriefed at the end of the experiment about the false memory induction process), but what if they weren’t? What if the memory remained impunitive, suggesting an “easy answer” to some of life’s problems? Given the process of rationalization and self-affirmation (Steele, 1999), it is not unlikely that the person would retrospectively justify the fictive criminal behaviour, and label it as not particularly bad. Given that the transgression is not real, a spontaneous retribution would never come (in the form of the reappearance of the assault victim, say), so contrition would not come either, at least not from that direction (unless a potential retribution is feared, for example by people high in neuroticism). Can we imagine that the theft-memory induced person will stand in front of, say, a nice looking jacket at a clothing store, would not feel like spending the money to cover the cost, and instead proceed with shoplifting, becoming an actual (as opposed to imaginary) offender? Or what if the self-absolution generalizes, and the false memory of stealing a toy in adolescence becomes a real white collar crime by a banker in adulthood?
There’s undoubtedly a limitation to what sort of personality changes can be induced. The changes must be attuned to the subjects’ dispositional and physical traits, their skills and abilities, and their life circumstances. To take an easy example, let’s say we induced a person with a memory that holds a suggestion of a potential to become a great basketball player. If that person is extremely short, he will soon shake off the improbably fleeting dream. Roberts and Robins (2010) found that there’s a correlation between dispositional traits and life goals, one kind of characteristic adaptation. I think it would not be outrageous to suggest that also other adaptations: strategies, schemas, values, mental representations of significant others and so on, would follow the same correlation. It seems like certain adaptations “fit” certain dispositional traits better. And, consequently, I think that a personality change would follow a false memory if the memory “suggests” a “fitting adaptation”. If we try to dress an S person with an XXL shirt, she is unlikely to feel comfortable in it. That being said, just because she is S doesn’t mean she wears all kinds of S clothing. Her life circumstances and history led her to wear some but not others. But given an alternative personal history, perhaps she could have worn a different set of S clothing that also fitted the present circumstances. I’d like to borrow from game theory the concept of Nash equilibrium, and use it softly here. A Nash equilibrium is “a solution concept of a non-cooperative game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only their own strategy. If each player has chosen a strategy and no player can benefit by changing strategies while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices and the corresponding payoffs constitutes a Nash equilibrium.” (from the English Wikipedia, “Nash Equalibrium”) In our example the player is the false memory subject, while the other players can be taken to be the systems in which the subject is embedded: family, friends, social circles, work colleagues and so on. I suppose that pre-intervention the subject was in a Nash equilibrium, doing her best according to her goals, with her environment doing its responsive best. A personality change will occur and survive if it allows for the systems to transition to a different Nash equilibrium: the subject is doing her best (following possibly a new set of goals) and the systems around her are adjusting accordingly. If an appropriate adjustment of the embedding systems is impossible in such a way that the subject would have to revert back to “old strategies” (pre-manipulation), she would.
Instead of cataloguing more detailed possible examples of induces personal adaptations, including social relevant ones (reversing stereotypes such as “girls can’t do math” or racist life views), I’d like to inspect a possible somewhat higher-level change of personality. Earlier the concept of “ego development” was mentioned, which corresponds to an evolving maturity of the self throughout the life span. This maturation is cultivated through a complex dynamic between the inner self and the outer environment (Weiner et at, 2002, p.470) and by what one might call life lessons, when it’s possible to localize a step in the progress. To take an example from the early stages, consider the impulsive newborn to whom punishment and reward are completely arbitrary. It is only through an insightful learning that she picks up the notion of rules, and appreciates the merit of gratification delay (Hy and Loevinger, 2014, pp. 3-5). However, as fewer and fewer people reach the higher stages of ego development (Hy and Loevinger, 2014, pp. 6-7), it is conceivable that some are denied of it due to their particular life experience. Is it possible to design and induce a false memory or a series of them such as it would facilitate his or her ego development? I believe so. In order to contemplate the idea, let us look at it from the other side, of “memory deletion”, in a concrete example from cinema. The sci-fi movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” presents a story about a romantic couple who turn, after a big fight, one after another to a clinic that provides a service of memory deletion, and as a coping mechanism delete each other from their memories: their entire relationship and any association with the other person vanishes completely. The unromantic cynics among us could view it as a simple removal of unnecessary sorrow. They did not get along, therefore they are not meant for each other, and their shared memory, insofar as it keeps on conjuring bad feelings, is undesirable. However, I’d like to argue that together with the pain they also threw away a valuable lesson. In an experiment conducted by King and Raspin (2004), divorced women wrote retrospectively about their “best future selves” as imagined before the divorce, and their best future selves as presently regarded after the divorce. The salience of the lost possible selves was negatively related to present subjective well-being, while the elaboration of the found- (post-divorce) as well as the lost future self was related to concurrent ego development, and ego development two years later. To repeat their statement, “results are interpreted as indicating that, while happiness may require us to avoid thinking about what might have been, maturity might require an awareness of the losses and sacrifices of adulthood.” (King and Raspin, 2004). Indeed, in the movie the couple ends up getting involved romantically again with each other, with the same unhappy ending. They believed it happened for the first time until they both discover their previous mutual erasure, and decide to push on together and try again despite the hardships. Indeed, had their first relationship stayed intact as memory, it could have provided them with an idea of the complexity of relationships and the necessary give and take that is involved. If that wouldn’t have helped them with their own relationship, it could have prepared them for future ones. But indeed, they forfeited the lesson and ended up repeating the same mistakes, like the child who cannot associate the rebuke with his misdemeanour and keeps on being punished. But could a false memory be induced that would bring about such maturation, that would lead to ego development? I can envision a certain scenario: take a person who had experienced a breakup of an important relationship that was far enough in the past that its details are somewhat blurry and open to suggestibility. Perhaps it could be possible to induce several false memories that together frame the relationship and its failure in such a way as to present a lesson. This lesson might or might not be relevant to the actual breakup it uses as foundation –– the important thing is the lesson itself, backed by the “value” of the lost relationship –– though a “matching lesson” might possibly further substantiate the “moral of the story” in ways that the false memory inducer does not necessarily need to understand.
What does this all suggest to us? Of course, experiments that could possibly verify these speculations would unlikely to pass any ethical committees; memory falsification paired with manipulation of subjects is not something that any orthodox scientist would condone, at least not with human subjects. But history suggests to us that often what became possible, good or otherwise, often became actualized one way or another. Perhaps it is something we should worry about; there are plenty of agents out there who would like to modulate our behaviour. Governments who want to stabilize their power, religious movements who promote their aims, commercial entities who want to sell us products. Already advertisements influence people’s choices, even those who think themselves as unaffected. Propaganda was used by past and present regimes to forward their ideologies and sway the people to their causes. Will future technology make it easier to induce false memories? What if facebook started to put fictional events in people’s timeline? What, I enjoyed a Snickers chocolate bar when I was twelve? Man, I had completely forgotten about Snickers, I think I’ll go buy one now.
References:
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