Читать книгу The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us - Christopher Chabris - Страница 19

Neil Reed recalled Coach Knight choking him during a practice. He remembered Assistant Coach Dan Dakich having to pull Knight off him, but Dakich claimed it never happened. One of them had a distorted memory for the event, but which one? In most cases of disputed memory like this, there’s no definitive way to determine who was right and who was wrong. What makes this example particularly interesting is that well after Reed, Dakich, and others went public with their accusations and memories, a videotape of the practice surfaced. It showed Knight approach Reed, grab him by the front of the neck with one hand for several seconds, and push him backward. Other coaches and players stopped what they were doing and watched. Nobody came to rescue Reed. No assistant coaches separated them. Reed correctly recalled that Knight had grabbed him by the throat, at least momentarily, but over time, in his mind, the memory was elaborated and distorted. It was made consistent with what plausibly might have happened rather than what did happen. And, to Reed, his totally false memory of being forcibly separated from Coach Knight was just as real as his more accurate memory of being choked. After viewing the video for a follow-up CNN/Sports Illustrated report, Reed said:

I know what happened and that [tape] proves what happened.

I think the moment after something like that, especially a 20-year-old kid being in that situation, I don’t think you can find fault in a little bit of…I mean…I’m not lying. That’s how I remember the thing happening and [former assistant coach Ron] Felling’s five feet from me. As far as people coming in between, I remember people coming between us.⁷

Why did Reed remember an embellished event while Knight remembered nothing at all? Before the tape surfaced, Knight told HBO’s Frank Deford that he didn’t remember choking Reed, and added, “There isn’t anything that I have done with one kid that I haven’t done with a lot of other kids.”⁸ For Knight, this was an unremarkable event—it was business as usual. His memory for the event was distorted to become consistent with his broader beliefs and expectations for what happens at practices: Coaches grab kids and move them around, showing them where to stand and what to do. Physical contact, for Knight, is a regular part of coaching. He misremembered the event as being less consequential than it was, distorting it to be more consistent with his own beliefs about typical coaching situations. For Reed, this event likely was far more consequential. As he noted, he was a “twenty-year-old kid” at the time and he probably hadn’t been grabbed by the neck often in practice. To him, it was a jarring and unusual event, one that he stored in his memory as “coach choked me.” He remembered the event based on the ways that it was salient to him, and as a result, it was distorted in the opposite direction from Knight’s version, becoming traumatic rather than trivial. For Knight, the incident was just like another arbitrary word in a list. For Reed, the incident had a powerful meaning, and the details were filled in accordingly.

People involved in the case of Neil Reed and Bobby Knight had sharply different recollections of what happened, but by the time they told their stories to the media in 2000, several years had already passed since the incident. It’s not unreasonable to think that memories can fade and morph over the years, and that they can be influenced by the motives and goals of the rememberer. But what if two people witness the exact same incident, and the delay before they have to describe it is no more than the length of time spent on hold waiting for a 911 operator?⁹

Leslie Meltzer and Tyce Palmaffy, a young couple who had met as undergraduates at the University of Virginia, were on their way home from dinner on a summer night in 2002 in Washington, D.C. They drove their Camry north on Fourteenth Street and stopped at a traffic light at the intersection of Rhode Island Avenue.¹⁰ Today, it costs upward of $300,000 to buy a small apartment near the Whole Foods supermarket in this area, but then, the neighborhood was still recovering from the effects of race riots and arson that took place in the 1960s. Tyce, a writer on education policy, was driving. His wife, Leslie, who had recently earned a law degree at Yale, was in the passenger seat. To her right, Leslie saw a man riding a bicycle down the sidewalk in their direction. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, another man approached the cyclist, pulled him off the bicycle, and began stabbing him repeatedly. Leslie heard the victim scream. She grabbed her cell phone and dialed 911, only to be greeted by a voice saying, “You have reached the emergency 911 service, all lines are busy, please hold.”

By the time the 911 operator got on the line, less than a minute had passed, but the assault was over and the light had turned green. Leslie described what she saw as they continued driving with the traffic down Fourteenth Street. The victim was a man in his twenties or thirties riding a bicycle. What about the assailant? He was dressed in jeans, she said. Overhearing her, Tyce interrupted to say that he was wearing sweatpants. They also disagreed about the kind of shirt he was wearing, how tall he was, and even whether he was black or Hispanic. They soon realized that they could agree only on the attacker’s age (twenties), on his weapon (a knife), and on the fact that they were not painting the clearest picture for the operator.

It is rare to witness exactly the same event, from the same vantage point as someone else, and then try to recall it in the presence of the other witness so soon afterward. Normally, when we observe an event, we store some memory of it. When we later recall the event, we do our best to retrieve our memory and report its contents. The memory seems vivid to us, and we typically lack any specific reason to doubt its accuracy. Had Tyce not been there to hear and correct—or at least contradict—Leslie’s report to the 911 operator, neither would have discovered the stark contradictions between their separate memories. Both were surprised by the extent of the differences. Tyce later recalled realizing right after the unnerving experience “how unbelievably untrustworthy witnesses must be,” an issue we’ll return to later in this book.