Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...L.B.J., perhaps the all-time champion legislator and pop political psychologist, was once asked in his most successful months how come he had lost a couple of minor skirmishes with Congress. "You don't want to win 'em all," he said. "Give the other side something, or there may come a day when you won't win anything." George Bush may want to start looking around for a victory or two to throw the Democrats' way lest he forget how lousy it feels to lose...
People -- not to mention juries -- place unwavering trust in the human ability to recall events, especially those that have had a strong emotional impact. But such confidence is often misplaced. "Our memory is not like a camera in which we get an accurate photograph," says psychologist Henry Ellis of the University of New Mexico...
Consider the Challenger explosion. As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, most people claim to remember where they were when they heard the news of the shuttle disaster. Ulric Neisser, a psychologist at Emory University, tested that assumption. The day after the 1986 accident he asked 106 students to write down how, when and where they learned the news. Three years later, he tracked down nearly half the group and asked them to describe their memories of the explosion. Though many claimed to recall it clearly, "often the memories were completely wrong," says Neisser. Many students said they...
...describe how Hill sounded years ago when she first told him about being sexually harassed by Thomas, Paul hesitated and then said Hill had sounded embarrassed. "He could have been falling back on a scripted memory of how he would expect someone to act in that circumstance," explains psychologist Douglas Peters of the University of North Dakota. On the other hand, experts are not the least bit disturbed because Hill's story grew and became more detailed as the hearings proceeded. Remembering incidents is an accretion process, psychologists say, and one image evokes another...
Memory integrates the past with the present: desires, fantasies, fears, even mood can shade the recollection. People have a tendency to suppress unpleasant experiences and embellish events to make themselves feel more important or attractive. "Some of us like to see ourselves in a rosier light," observes psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington, "that we gave more to charity than we really did, that we voted in the last election when we really didn't, that we were nicer to our kids than we really were...