Welcome a new entry to the blogroll: You Are Not So Smart. In my unsolicited opinion, it should be bookmarked by every skeptic.

The blog bills itself as “a celebration of self delusion.” It has some really informative posts on subjects like confirmation bias, logical fallacies, popular myths, and our species’ susceptibility to irrational thinking.

I particularly enjoyed the article on the malleability of memory. There, I found this fun video about a created memory involving Jackie Onassis:

Also from the article:

In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus at the University of Washington conducted a study in which people watched  safety films of car crashes.

She then asked the participants to estimate how fast the car was going, but she divided the people into groups and asked the question differently for each. These were the questions:

• About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?
• About how fast were the cars going when they collided into each other?
• About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?
• About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
• About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?

The people’s answers in mph averaged like this:

• Smashed – 40.8
• Collided – 39.3
• Bumped – 38.1
• Hit – 34.0
• Contacted – 31.8

Just by changing the wording, the memories of the subjects were altered.

She raised the ante by asking the same people if they saw broken glass in the film. There was no broken glass.

Sure enough, the people who were given the word smashed in their question were twice as likely to remember seeing glass, and people from every group falsely remembered seeing it.

Fascinating (and worrisome) stuff. And it makes me further wonder what confidence we can have in the First Vision accounts or the Gospels when both were written many years after the events they’re supposed to record.