Did Scientists Just Prove How The Mandela Effect Works? | Unveiled

Did Scientists Just Prove How The Mandela Effect Works?

Many of the strange processes in our brain remain unexplained, leading to some truly “out there” hypotheses. The feeling of deja vu, for example, is familiar to everyone, but not well understood… so the phenomenon has been attributed to, among other things, memories from a past life, or even to time travel! The Mandela effect is in this same mysterious boat. It’s such an odd cognitive curiosity that some think it can only be explained by the existence of parallel worlds, but a new study has set out to disprove that notion.

This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: Did scientists just prove how the Mandela effect works?

The Mandela effect is a phenomenon in which people collectively misremember historical events and details. It was named by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who claimed to have clear memories of the South African human rights activist Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. In reality, he died in 2013. Broome asserted that many other people shared her false ‘memory’, however, and so the idea was born. Another popular example involves the spelling of the Berenstain Bears children's books, which some people argue was actually Berenstein. Then there’s the belief that “Looney Tunes” is spelled T-O-O-N-S, instead of T-U-N-E-S, or that Curious George has a tail (which he does not). What makes these examples so surprising is just how certain people are in their beliefs and how widespread those beliefs have come to be. Sometimes, more people remember the fake version than the real one, which seems to defy logic.

While there are some claims that the Mandela effect is evidence of a person being unwittingly transferred from one parallel world to another, the phenomenon is generally viewed as an instance of false memory. Psychologists have studied false memories for decades, but explaining them remains a challenge. One proven case involves a 2010 polling of people in Bologna, Italy, about the Bologna Centrale railway station clock. The station was bombed in 1980 and the clock was broken as a result, but quickly repaired. It was later permanently set to the time of the bombing in remembrance, but 92% of people surveyed were sure that the clock had been broken since the bombing. It turns out, then, that human memory is faulty and unreliable. And the implications are wide. Research has shown, for example, that eyewitness testimony can’t be altogether trusted, because people will often make up memories of whatever happened. Not deliberately, but involuntarily, as a result of our fallible brains. Meanwhile, other studies have shown that false memories are pretty easy to purposefully implant into other people; with researchers variously capable of convincing experiment participants that they can remember events that never actually occurred.

In 2021, two researchers from the University of Chicago, Deepasri Prasad and Wilma A Bainbridge, conducted a formal study into the Mandela effect. As of writing, their paper, titled “The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people”, was in preprint, accepted for publication in the journal “Psychological Science”. Since there has never been experimental confirmation of the visual Mandela effect, the researchers sought to establish that popular icons elicit consistent and specific false memories. They also tested whether attentional or visual differences drive the phenomenon.

To this end, they gathered popular examples of the effect, such as C3PO’s leg, Curious George’s tail, the Fruit of the Loom logo, and Pikachu’s tail. Participants were given the real image, alongside the Mandela effect version, and a third version that had been manipulated in some other way. Participants were asked to choose the correct image, rate how confident they were in their decision, and estimate how familiar they were with the image. The first thing that stood out to researchers was that some of the most popular examples on the internet, and thus the most well-known, were misremembered a large amount of the time. Participants often pointed to the VME image, or Visual Mandela Effect image, as being the correct image. Despite saying that they had seen the image many times and were confident in their answer, the participants were still wrong a lot of the time. The study noted the peculiar contradiction, stating that “their accuracy is surprisingly low given the reported familiarity and confidence people had with these images”. This research led them to five characteristics that must be present in order for something to be considered a Mandela effect and not just a false memory: the example must have low identification accuracy among subjects, a specific false representation, high consistency in being chosen, high familiarity, and high confidence.

Using the data, the researchers looked at the interaction between these variables and found a high correlation between familiarity and confidence, but low correlation between familiarity and accuracy, or confidence and accuracy! What this showed is that how well someone knew an image, or how certain they were, had little effect on whether they picked the right one or not. But the researchers wanted to dig deeper, and this is where the study got weird. For the second experiment, they showed participants the correct image, had them study it, and then asked them a bit later to choose the right image out of a set. Somehow, remarkably, people still chose the visual mandela effect image over the correct one!

Intrigued, the scientists used MouseView, a mouse-tracking method analogous to eye tracking, to see if visual processes were to blame. They were able to determine that where people looked on the image, and how long they looked, didn’t affect accuracy. Next, the team turned to Google, with the theory being that maybe the most popular images on the internet contained the VME image, and so people are seeing them a lot more than the real thing. But that wasn’t the case either; it turned out that the top Google images on the subject in question didn’t contain the false Mandela version. Lastly, they decided to test people in a free draw scenario, where they asked participants to draw the character or object in question. And people still added in the Mandela effect in their drawings. This made the effect even more confusing, because people weren’t just choosing the VME image out of a list of options; they themselves were creating the Mandela effect during recall.

What’s strange isn’t just that people misremember popular icons. It’s that there is a curious consistency in what people misremember. While this research didn’t explain the cause behind visual Mandela effects, it did rule out some possibilities. For example, one explanation that’s been proposed is Schema Theory, which posits that people fill in information based on association. So, someone might report seeing a fire if they only saw smoke, or a bullet when given a picture of a gun. But researchers showed that this didn’t fully explain it, because the commonly associated words and ideas weren’t chosen. In their study, people chose a Fruit of The Loom logo with a cornucopia behind it, the VME, more often than the logo with a plate under the fruit, even though the plate would be the most obvious association. All in all, they concluded that no one thing likely causes the mysterious effect, admitting, “There might not be a universal explanation for why the VME occurs”.

So, unfortunately, researchers are still in the dark about what exactly is causing so many people to share the same false memory. Pikachu never had a black tip on his tail and the monopoly man never had a monocle, so why does everyone remember them over the real images? It’s possible that a number of things work together to create the phenomenon. This could still include schema theory. It could also involve confabulation - distorted, misinterpreted, or fabricated memories - and priming - where exposure to one thing affects the response to whatever one is shown next. But, all in all, the Mandela effect remains unexplained by science.

Some may be disappointed by the result of the study, but the fact that they couldn’t explain the effect only serves to make the phenomenon that much more mysterious. This research was the first to look at the effect specifically and the researchers were surprised at how odd the results were even in a controlled setting. The effect is extremely stubborn, present across many different people and persists even when someone is shown the correct image as reference. For now, there’s no accepted rational answer, giving free rein to speculate further! So, what do you think is happening here? Do you come from a universe where it’s the Berenstein Bears instead of the Berenstain Bears? Do you see a monocle on the monopoly man? Or is it all just a trick of the mind? Because that’s how scientists specifically tried (but ultimately failed) to prove how the Mandela effect works.