On March 26, 2013, anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams made an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. In the course of Letterman’s interview with him, Williams recounted a story that left viewers wondering whether he was either an out and out liar, or a fantasist.  The story eventually cost him his job and caused irreparable damage to his reputation.

About a decade earlier, Williams had been flying over Iraq in a helicopter. The helicopter flying ahead of the one he was in came under fire and Williams and his companions were forced to make an emergency landing. At least, that was how Williams had related the story in almost every news report and interview he had given on the matter in the decade preceding his Late Show appearance. However, that night as he sat across from Letterman, Williams produced a different story; one in which he was a more central character in the helicopter drama. Williams claimed to have been in the helicopter that was attacked, and that he and his companions had to make an emergency landing after a near brush with death. After relating this undeniably more exciting version of his narrative, Williams retold it on a few other occasions. His account was eventually challenged by the servicemen aboard the helicopter that had been under fire. After the inaccuracies in Williams’ story were revealed, he was heavily criticized by the media and the public. Despite issuing a televised apology, Williams was suspended from his job and eventually demoted.

Did Williams deserve the backlash he received and the consequences that followed? Public debate has focused on whether he told a deliberate lie, or misremembered the facts of an event that occurred many years ago. Is it possible for someone to alter critical components of a story without realizing they have done so? How does such a change in memory come about? Williams may have been the victim of normal memory processes to which we are all susceptible. To illustrate, we review the literature on conversational remembering which demonstrates that the simple act of retelling can, in some cases, dramatically reshape our memory.

Memories are reproductions that can be shaped by social influence

Contrary to popular belief, our memories are not libraries of film clips awaiting re-play (Ost, Easton, Hope, French & Wright, in press; Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld & Loftus, 2014). Decades of research have shown that memories can sometimes be inaccurate. In the early 1900s, research by Sir Frederic Bartlett culminated in one of the most influential theories of memory to date. In one set of studies, Bartlett’s participants were asked to read and then write down a Native North American folk tale called “War of the Ghosts”. He observed that when these participants re-wrote the story after time delays, their versions included departures from the original tale. Specifically, participants omitted and altered details in a way consistent with their own cultural schemas. Schemas are general organized structures that aid in the creation of memories and guide their later retrieval (Roediger & DeSoto, 2015). For example, a typical schema for ‘school’ might include a building with classrooms, desks, teachers, and students.If you are shown an image of a classroom, and then asked to recall what you have seen, you might include certain schema-consistent items that were not present in the original scene (e.g., a chalkboard, a teacher’s desk). Therefore, your recollection of the classroom is not an accurate reproduction, but rather, a schema-guided reconstruction. In essence Bartlett (1932) proposed that our memories are more often than not reconstructions - rather than faithful reproductions - of past events (Ost & Costall, 2002).

In his 1932 book 'Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology', Bartlett also emphasized the social nature of memory (or remembering). Subsequent research has provided support for his assertion, showing that people often discuss and form memories in the presence of others (Hirst & Echterhoff, 2012), regardless of whether those events are mundane (e.g., everyday events recorded in a diary; Pasupathi, McLean, & Weeks, 2009) or more noteworthy (e.g., criminal events witnessed in person; Paterson & Kemp, 2006; Skagerberg & Wright, 2008). In sum, most remembering is a schema-driven process of reconstruction that often occurs in a social context. As a result, there are many reasons why, over the course of a decade, Brian Williams’ account of his experience over the skies in Iraq might have changed. Here, we will address several explanations based on findings from the literature on conversational remembering.

Considering context and audience: Williams was telling his tale to entertain, not to inform

In the course of a conversation, speakers tend to focus more on evaluative and affective information, preferring to share opinions and feelings about what transpired, rather than recounting events serially (Hyman, 1994). Thus, conversational retellings do not typically involve detailed recollections presented in a stable chronological order (Marsh, 2007). In one study, researchers recorded new parents’ telephone conversations with friends and family regarding the recent birth of a child. Parents often initially discussed topics of greatest interest to the listener, such as the gender of the baby, and its general health – narrative descriptions of events as they unfolded were of secondary concern (Tenney, 1989).

With respect to Williams’ altered recollection of his experience, it is important to note that he was on a show that emphasizes entertainment value. Williams was not behind his news desk. He was telling his tale to entertain, not to inform, and catered to an audience that demanded action and excitement—best evoked when a tale is told from a first-person perspective. Research confirms that people often exaggerate for the purpose of entertaining. For example, Dudukovic, Marsh, and Tversky (2004) had participants read a story and re-tell it either accurately or for the purpose of entertainment. A separate scorer, unaware of each participant’s experimental condition, rated the retellings for accuracy and level of entertainment. Retellings that were rated as highly entertaining tended to be less accurate. Entertaining retellings were told in the language of story-telling—that is, they were told with confidence, and usually in the present tense, with increased exaggerations, omissions and some added details. When retelling events from their own lives, Marsh and Tversky (2004) found that 61% of participants admitted distorting the event – most commonly by omitting certain details and embellishing others. Participants communicated some events repeatedly; of these, 76% were altered across retellings. Participants attributed alterations to the fact that they were recounting the events for different audiences.

Why might the audience of a retelling exert such an effect? According to the principle of co-construction, recollections of memories in conversation are the product of both the speaker and their social environment (Pasupathi, 2001). Attentive and engaged listeners tend to elicit more detailed accounts from speakers, facilitating speaker’s long-term memory for an event (Pasupathi, Stallworth, & Murdoch, 1998). Moreover, speakers alter (or ‘tune’) their retellings of experienced events to suit a particular audience, and these alterations can affect their underlying memory for an event. Higgins and Rholes (1978), for example, had participants read a description of a stimulus person that contained negative, positive, or ambiguous evaluations. Participants then wrote a message describing the person to a receiver whom they were told either liked or disliked the person. Results showed that participants wrote a more negative description when they were told that the receiver disliked the person, and a more positive description when they were told that the receiver liked the person. Additionally, participants’ later recall of the original description of the stimulus person included distortions that were congruent with the message they had written for the receiver.  Thus, participants altered the descriptions in their message to match the receiver’s opinion, and these alterations influenced their later recall; the researchers termed this the saying-is-believing effect, but it has been referred to elsewhere as audience tuning (Hellmann, Echterhoff, Kopietz, Niemeier, & Memon, 2011).In sum,once a memory has been altered through conversation, subsequent retellings are more likely to reflect the most recent retelling, rather than the original memory. This may result from the restructuring of schemas that guide future retellings, as well as selective rehearsal of information (Marsh & Tversky, 2000).

The effects of repeated retellings on subsequent recall: Williams told stories about his experience many times

Having told his story to many different people on many occasions, Williams’ account is likely to have been gradually edited and altered.As noted earlier, speakers edit the details they discuss to serve their objectives, and the interests and assumed prior knowledge of the listener. Thus, people normally recall more about an event than they recount (Pasupathi, 2001).A major finding with respect to the selective reporting of memories in conversation is that details that go unreported, and therefore unrehearsed, may be left out of future retellings of the same memory. This phenomenon, termed retrieval induced forgetting, is thought to occur because selective retellings strengthen memories for mentioned details, while allowing memory traces of unmentioned details to weaken and decay (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994).

Brian Williams gave several documented accounts of his ordeal over the skies in Iraq. He probably gave several more undocumented, and informal accounts—discussions with friends, family and peers—of his experience. When telling his story, Williams likely capitalized on the parts that elicited the most interest from his audience, omitting the more mundane details. Each of his retellings had the potential to alter his memory for the event, slowly forming the account he eventually related to Letterman. In fact, the gradual change in his story is reflected in a blog post he wrote in 2008. In the post, which was intended as a tribute to a war veteran, Williams wrote that the helicopter flying ahead of his was attacked from the ground, and the four helicopters in pursuit took fire. Five years later, Williams escalated from being in a helicopter that ‘took fire’ to being in the actual helicopter that was hit.

Source Misattribution: Williams could have muddled his account with that of others

Inaccuracies in co-constructed memories can sometimes be the result of source monitoring errors. Source monitoring refers to one’s ability to identify the origin of remembered information (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). After recalling an event with others, individuals may fail to identify inaccuracies in the account introduced by other group members, and instead attribute these to the experienced event. For example, Meade and Roediger (2002) showed a participant and a confederate pictures of typical household scenes (e.g. kitchen, bedroom, desk). Afterwards, the participant and confederate were asked to verbally recall items they had seen. In this phase, the confederate named some items that had not actually appeared in the scenes. Later, when participants completed an individual recall test for items from the scenes, they sometimes incorporated the items that had been mentioned by the confederate but were not actually present in the original scene. These results demonstrate the spread of a memory from one person to others through verbal interaction, termed social contagion of memory (Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001).

Williams may have discussed his experience with those who were present in the helicopter that was hit. It is possible that through interviews and casual conversations with service personnel who were closer to the action, Williams picked up information and details about the event, and over time, incorporated them into his memory.

The role of egocentrism: Williams brought himself closer to the action

Source monitoring errors can often have an egocentric bias. People can confuse details reported by someone else as having been reported by themselves. Hyman and colleagues had participants study word lists individually and then recall them in pairs (Hyman, Roundhill, Werner, & Rabiroff, 2014). Some of the words on the lists were studied by both members of the pair, some were studied by only one member, and some had not been previously studied by either member. After engaging in collaborative recall of the words, each individual completed a source-monitoring task in which they identified the source of each recalled word. Participants made frequent source attribution errors and these errors tended to be egocentric, in that participants mistakenly attributed recalled words to themselves more often than to their partners.

Real-life examples of egocentrism in memory reports have been documented in the literature. In the wake of the Watergate scandal in the United States, psychologist Ulric Neisser conducted an in-depth assessment of the testimony of John Dean, a former counsel to President Nixon (Neisser, 1981). Dean gave the Watergate Investigating Committee detailed information about classified conversations that later turned out to have been tape-recorded. Thus, the case offered a perfect opportunity for comparing Dean’s retellings with what had actually been said. Neisser found that Dean accurately reported the overall gist of the conversations, but his detailed recollection of specific episodes was poor. Neisser also noted that Dean tended to exaggerate his role, making himself more central to the plot, and dramatized events—much like Williams did.

In conclusion: Williams’ public apology for his very human error

In an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s The Today Show several months after his controversial blunder, Williams apologized for his behavior, and offered some explanation for what had happened. He noted the “double standard” with which he had chosen his words in a work setting and outside of work. Williams admitted that it was “ego” that caused him to want to put himself closer to the action. He also mentioned that he had told the story correctly for years before telling it incorrectly, saying that eventually “It got mixed up, it got turned around in my mind.” Williams insisted that he was not intentionally trying to mislead people. Indeed, given his explanation for what happened, it seems plausible that his memory for the event was influenced by a combination of factors discussed throughout this paper. Having told his story to entertain on some occasions, retrieval induced forgetting may have reinforced his memory for embellishments at the expense of more accurate details.

The process of conversational remembering exerts a powerful influence on our memory for experienced events. Remembering with others is a means through which we communicate information about ourselves, learn about others, and create and maintain social bonds (Hyman, 1994; Marsh, 2007). When individuals discuss an experienced event with others, their aim is more often to entertain and engage socially than to inform. Such retellings are told in the language of story-telling, and often contain exaggerations and distortions of the original event (Dudukovich et al., 2004). Our memory for specific episodes from the past is also selective; we remember events that promote a positive self-image (Harris, Sutton, & Barnier, 2010). Brian Williams is likely guilty of doing something most people are prone to do: in an attempt to be entertaining and engaging, he embellished story details and brought himself closer to the action. His distorted recall of an event that occurred long ago was likely due to retelling it multiple times and for various purposes and audiences over the years. If everyone’s stories were placed under the microscope in the way Williams’ has been, few would qualify for positions in news media or high office. The public should therefore be more understanding of all too human errors like Williams’, and at least consider whether such claims may reflect an honest mistake.

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