This is to keep the witnesses’ memories free from suggestion of the other witnesses. When interviewing witnesses of a crime, officers will ask the witnesses to not discuss the incident amongst themselves and will separate them when possible. False memories are very real, and people are insanely susceptible to the power of suggestion. But how is it possible that thousands of people could have memories of something that never happened? Memories that they claim are detailed and true? Well, it’s more common than you may think. So, it’s easy to see why the actor is so embedded in our childhood nostalgia. In 1996 alone the comedian, whose real name is David Adkins, starred in Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco, First Kid, Jingle All The Way, and The Cherokee Kid. According to these believers, Shazaam is supposed to have starred 90’s sensation Sinbad as a bumbling genie who is accidentally summoned by two children during a time of grief. But that doesn’t stop a large percentage of 90s kids from believing that it was… from somehow having memories of watching a movie that they could not have possibly watched. It was never filmed, never released, and never seen by anybody. In a world rife with misinformation, “fake news,” and the ability to avoid conversing with people who disagree with you on the internet, it’s easy to imagine more Shazaam-like memories infecting people’s minds.Except… this movie never existed. It’s called the “the social contagion of memory,” as one of Tait’s sources explains. That all the Shazaam truthers are riffing off one another, giving each other subtle suggestions - like in Loftus’s studies - to form a false narrative that exists in all their minds.
Tait has another intriguing suggestion: The false memory of the movie Shazaam is fueled by discussion about it on the web. “The most worrying thing is that you don’t need to be suffering from psychological issues to have false memories created in your head,” neuroscientist Dean Burnett writes in his book Idiot Brain, which outlines all the ways our brains fail us. All it took was showing study participants fake letters from relatives that claimed they had been lost in a mall as a child. More famously, she showed that people can be made to recall childhood memories that never happened. In her research, just the mere suggestion by an interviewer that cars "collided" instead of "hit" will lead people to recall a car accident as more severe than it was. The truth is much simpler: Human memory is really, really malleable.Įlizabeth Loftus, psychology’s leading researcher on false memory, has shown this time and time again. The Shazaam trutherism Tait reports on started on the Mandela effect subreddit.) (The “effect” is named after Nelson Mandela because it finds its roots among people who swear they remember him dying while in prison. One possibility is the Mandela effect, or the idea that a group of people who share a false memory all originated in a parallel universe in which the memory wasn’t false. This is how those who believe in the “Sinbad genie movie” feel when people say they are simply getting confused about Shaq’s Kazaam. You’d turn to your best friend, your brother, your mum, and say, “Hey, remember A Bug’s Life? It was about ants”, and your friend/brother/mum would turn to you and says: “No, darling. After endlessly scouring the internet, you’d come up with nothing, despite your own distinct memories of a bunch of ants going on wild hijinks through the undergrowth. Imagine if you woke up this morning and Disney’s 1998 animation A Bug’s Life did not exist. They think the two movies were released around the same time (like the asteroid apocalypse movies Armageddon and Deep Impact, which both premiered in 1998). The New Statesmen piece explores a fascinating question: How could so many people share the same false memory of the same fake movie?įirst off: It’s not that these people are confusing Shazaam for Kazaam, the very real movie starring Shaquille O’Neal as a genie. The young mind !- Sinbad September 7, 2016 Have you noticed no one my age has seen this so called Sinbad Genie movie, only you people who were kids in the 90's.
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