How the language we use to describe an event shapes our memories

Elizabeth Loftus showed subjects a videotape of a car accident. Some subjects were then asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’, others were asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit one another?’ The average speed given by the first group was 41 miles per hour and by the second 34 miles per hour. A week later subjects were asked whether they had noticed any broken glass resulting from the accident. The presence of broken glass was incorrectly reported by twice as many of the first group as of the second: the suggestion that the cars had been travelling fast had made subjects confabulate the occurrence of broken glass.

One verb invented broken glass.

Not on the road. In memory. “Smashed” did more than make the collision sound faster; it helped some people later remember debris that was not there. Language is not the little caption beneath reality. Sometimes it sneaks into the editing suite.

Businesses perform this trick all day. A customer has an “objection”, so sales prepares to overcome it instead of wondering whether the customer has spotted a real flaw. An “operator error” sends the investigation towards the person; a “system failure” sends it towards the design. A disappointing launch becomes an “experiment” and suddenly everybody feels clever enough to keep their job. The labels may be defensible. They are not innocent.

The first description of an ambiguous event is therefore a land grab. Meeting titles, dashboard labels and incident summaries become the language in which later evidence is remembered. By the third meeting, nobody recalls choosing the frame at all.

For consequential decisions, I would write two rival descriptions before interpreting anything. What changes if the customer raised a “question”, the operator met a “trap”, or the failed launch was simply a failed launch? Changing the verb cannot change the event. It can stop one interested version of the event becoming official history by lunchtime.