When asked about the life and death of lawyer, politician, and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, many people will say that this legendary champion of human rights died in the 1980s while serving a life sentence in a South African prison. In truth, Mr. Mandela died just 10 years ago, on December 5, 2013, at his home in Johannesburg. Some of Mandela’s most notable accomplishments were achieved in the years after his release from prison in 1988 — winning the Nobel Peace Prize, serving as the first democratically elected president of South Africa, and establishing the Foundation that bears his name. However, due to what some have identified as a shared false memory, a significant number people still believe that Mandela died prematurely in prison from tuberculosis.
Some who hold onto the idea of his early death will even support their belief with vivid recollections — of a speech delivered by his widow on the occasion of his death, of news reports about a funeral procession, and images of emotional mourners at the scene — none of which are real. This collective belief or false memory is common enough that a self-described “paranormal researcher” named Fiona Broome coined a term for the phenomenon — the Mandela Effect. Since creating the label in 2010 to describe Mandela’s purported early death, Ms. Broome has applied the idea to false memories or distorted recollections in general, often using the term to describe mistaken memories of a historical event or shared cultural experience. Examples are plentiful, and many are detailed in the links at bottom.
How does this collective misremembering happen and why is relevant today? Psychology has attempted to explain the reasons for our shared delusions, as have other fields of study including philosophy, metaphysics, and neuroscience, but what about the law? What can the Mandela Effect tell us about the reliability of eye-witness testimony, for instance? How can confabulation, a correlated psychological phenomenon, play a role when deposing a witness? How might false recollections created by the human brain to compensate for memory gaps taint the outcome of a case? How might litigators use the technique of priming — exposing juries to stimulus language in an effort to suggest, trigger, or elicit a specific kind of response — be used to influence a verdict? What does the Mandela Effect tell us about how dis/misinformation can be planted, promoted, and perpetuated to distort events, memories, news, or ideas — the same phenomena that then shape the zeitgeist and our collective experience of the world around us?
The Mandela Effect raises more questions than it answers, but understanding its roots and its reach is an interesting intellectual exercise for us all. To some extent, our shared delusions about the world serve a purpose — to bond us all in a common experience, but those delusions may deserve a closer look. Awareness of the false memories we share is essential for us to continue learning about the world. Seeking clarity from reliable, authoritative, trustworthy, and authentic sources of information — not just intuition — is a good habit to develop. We should learn to question our assumptions to prevent being blinded or led astray by our own (false) certainty.
Further Reading
To learn more about the Mandela Effect and the theories surrounding it, explore the links below.