Latest on the Brian Williams story: END OF REAL NEWS: BRIAN WILLIAMS SUSPENDED FOR 6 MONTHS
And see: Brian Williams' "Mis-Remembering" Will Cost Him $5 Million, Suspended By NBC For 6 Months
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Morgan Housel writes very insightful articles about investing at The Motley Fool. I can only provide excerpts, but you can read his full articles by clicking your way over there.
In Everyone's a Liar, Morgan defends NBC's news anchor Brian Williams over lying about his frightening experience in 2003 when he was on a military helicopter in Iraq and the aircraft came under enemy fire and was forced to land. Happily, he and crew members were rescued by the military.
This rendition of events was a lie. Several military members pointed out that Williams was never actually on the targeted helicopter. He was on a helicopter one hour behind the real action. Did Williams lie? Probably not, according to Morgan Housel. Just as likely, if not more, Williams's mind elaborately wove bits and pieces of events that did happen into a story that never happened.
Is this related to investing? Yes. Hint: don't be so fast to trust what you think you remember happened in the stock market. Check your brokerage statements.
The phenomenon of telling ourselves tales and coming to believe them plays a large role in interpersonal relationships, often very important ones–our spouses, our children, our coworkers. Sure, some people are just out and out liars. But sometimes someone may be telling you their twisted up story and they believe it. Other times, your story is the more twisted of the accounts. And there's no brokerage statement to check.
Everyone's a Liar
Excerpt:
False memories are more common than you might think, particularly when they involve emotional events, like reporting from a war zone. Understanding how your mind can fool you is key to knowing how seriously to take yourself, even in something like investing.
[…]
"Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy," said novelist Gilbert Parker. That's because memory is just a series of woven-together stories we tell ourselves. And we can be such good storytellers — and such elaborate weavers — that what we recall as fact can be bits and pieces of truth spun into something that never happened.
[…]
Williams reported a story on the helicopter that came under actual fire. Replaying "what-if" thoughts in his head about a helicopter an hour in front of his own — which surely terrified he and his family — could have caused him to weave the two stories together.
"I don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another," Williams said after admitting his mistake.
[…]
"We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," Loftus told The Guardian in 2003. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories — we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."
It all comes down to taking an event that actually happened and pushing it against one that could have happened, should have happened, or almost happened. Our storytelling mind takes it from there, filling the gaps of actual memories with the visions of false ones.
"Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation — confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you, or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened at all," wrote psychologists Caroll Tavris and Elliot Aronson in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). "Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories. Once we have a narrative, we shape our memories to fit into it."
(My emphasis.)
Read Everyone's a Liar here.
Second and third pictures via Pixabay.
