Vividly imagining an event that did not happen raises confidence that it did.
Garry and colleagues had subjects rate the likelihood that childhood events had happened to them, imagine some of them, then rate again. Confidence rose for the imagined events. The account is fluency: imagining supplies detail that later feels like recollection, and the mind has no reliable marker distinguishing a remembered image from a constructed one.
In practice
- A team that rehearses a failure scenario in detail becomes convinced it has happened before.
- A person who has told a hypothetical version of an argument several times is no longer sure which version occurred.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind