INVESTIGATING THE PREVALENCE AND PREDICTORS OF THE MANDELA EFFECT

Abstract

While psychologists have studied false memory for many decades, there has been no research in terms of investigating the Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is a situation in which a large mass of people believes something about the past that is not true; it is a collective form of false memory (Cunic, 2020). The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of the Mandela Effect and whether any basic individual differences are associated with experiencing the effect. Participants completed a basic visual memory task, followed by the Mandela Effect task where they were asked which one of two images were correct and then asked to rate their confidence in their responses. Providing images side by side were considered to be an appropriate way to demonstrate the Mandela Effect because people tend to respond better when being able to visualize what is being addressed. The significance with these images, were that many people around the world remember the selected examples incorrectly, despite how the specific examples have been apart of people's lives for years. These particular examples come from a website that is specifically about the Mandela Effect. This website had explained that the Mandela Effect constantly makes us question our memories, which is why the display that includes a slideshow of pictures is themed as a form of pop culture (Bakkila, 2020). This was then followed by the reveal of the correct answers, and participants were then asked to rate their level of surprise after the reveal of the right answers. Some key findings to note, were that people had experienced the Mandela Effect for half of the trials on average. This was predicted by their visual memory abilities that were measured in the emoji memory recall task, the results of the correlation were significant with a result of r(77) = -0.227, p = 0.044. This shows that those with a higher recall score in the memory recall task were less susceptible to the Mandela Effect.