AVOIDING MEMORY TRICKS
By Tom Grimes and Deborah Potter

Has this ever happened to you? You're watching the news at home on a day off from work when you see a story you haven't heard about before. A few hours later, you tell a friend about it. And the next day, when you read the morning paper, you discover that you had the people in the story all mixed up.

Psychologists call this confusion "memory misattribution" and it's not uncommon. Even when a station makes every effort to correctly identify the characters in a news story, viewers may get them confused. And the consequences can be costly. Many defamation suits have been brought against television stations and networks because people have mentally recast the characters in a news story. But new research suggests that a few simple steps can help viewers keep the characters straight, making your newscasts less confusing and possibly keeping you out of legal trouble.

The study compared two stories about a malpractice suit against a plastic surgeon that included footage of the accused physician and another doctor who commented on the case. The stories were identical, except for the gender of the two doctors. In one version, the surgeon was male and the colleague was female. In the other, the surgeon was female and the colleague was male. The characters were on screen for the same amount of time, and neither one spoke.

The researchers found that viewers had the most trouble keeping the characters straight when the surgeon was female and the colleague was male. Asked to identify the characters after watching a newscast that included the malpractice story, viewers made significantly more mistakes in identifying the male colleague, but were correct significantly more often when the surgeon was male. These results held true for both men and women viewers, suggesting that viewers' memories can be tricked by widely-held stereotypes. They apparently expected the doctor accused of malpractice to be male and the colleague to be female. When the roles were reversed, viewers made far more mistakes in characterizing who did what.

To reduce the mind's reliance on stereotypes, the researchers ran the experiment again, only this time, they showed some viewers pictures of the characters before screening the story. The difference was dramatic. When the doctor accused of malpractice was female, viewers who saw her picture first identified her correctly 61 percent of the time, compared to just 11 percent for those who had not seen her picture. And the male colleague was categorized correctly 76 percent of the time by viewers who saw his picture first, compared to 31 percent for those who did not see his picture.

What this suggests is that when you're faced with a story in which viewer stereotypes could lead to confusion about who did what, you might want to consider using still frames of the characters along with their names in a tease or lead-in graphic. The researchers say this kind of brief visual preview could focus viewers' attention and help them keep track of who is who.

References:

1. Tom Grimes holds the Ross Beach chair in electronic journalism at Kansas State University. He has worked at WCBS and ABC News. This report is based on a study he conducted along with Jeffrey Gibbons and Rodney Vogel, published in the March 2003 issue of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.