Jan. 4, 2013

“Psychologist Jean Piaget reported that his earliest memory was of his nurse defending him against a potential kidnapper at age two. He distinctly recalled sitting frightened in the baby carriage while the nurse fought off the man (incurring a scratch on her face in the process), and the police officer chasing away the kidnapper with his short white baton. Piaget was even able to describe the officer’s uniform in detail. His family, relieved that the nurse had prevented his kidnapping, rewarded her with a gold watch.

“Thirteen years later, the nurse returned the gold watch to the family accompanied by a letter confessing that she had made up the story because she wanted to raise the family’s opinion of her.

“Piaget used this false memory to emphasize the role of others’ influences on one’s memories. He noted that the nurse frequently had recounted the story in his presence, and others then had repeated the story in his hearing, thus creating the memories he had adopted as his own.

“Piaget noted that even in his old age those memories persisted as clear events, even though he knew them to be false.”

– From “The Encyclopedia of the Brain and Brain Disorders” by Carol Turkington and Joseph Harris (2009)

Given this phenomenon of memory, it’s hardly surprising that no child-witness against the Edenton Seven has stepped forward to publicly recant.

April 5, 2014

“Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.… In science the growth of knowledge is cumulative. But human life as a whole is not a cumulative activity; what is gained in one generation may be lost in the next.”

– From “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals” (2002) by John Gray, British political philosopher

An arguable proposition, certainly – but how else to explain the widespread acceptance of day-care ritual-abuse claims 300 years after the Salem Witch Trials? As noted by sociologist David G. Bromley, this chronic failure to learn-and-remember makes inevitable yet more moral panics – whatever their specifics.

And how else to explain this just-published revisionist history?

July 13, 2012

“It is painful to admit this, but when the McMartin story first hit the news, the two of us, independently, were inclined to believe that the preschool teachers were guilty. Not knowing the details of the allegations, we mindlessly accepted the ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ cliché; as scientists, we should have known better.

“When, months after the trial ended, the full story came out – about the emotionally disturbed mother who made the first accusation and whose charges became crazier and crazier until even the prosecution stopped paying attention to her; about how the children had been coerced over many months to ‘tell’ by zealous social workers on a moral crusade; about how the children’s stories became increasingly outlandish – we felt foolish and embarrassed that we had sacrificed our scientific skepticism on the altar of outrage.

“But our dissonance is nothing compared with that of the people who were personally involved in or who took a public stand, including the many psychotherapists, psychiatrists and social workers who consider themselves skilled clinicians and advocates for children’s rights.

– From “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2007)

Of course, not everyone who “mindlessly accepted the ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ cliché’ ” has recovered his misplaced scientific skepticism.

Dec, 4, 2016

“The testimony [in the Salem witch trials] is full of tall tales, unless you happen to believe – as one woman confessed, having vowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – that she flew on a stick with her church deacon and two others to a satanic baptism, and that she had, the previous Monday, carried her minister’s specter through the air along with her, having earlier conferred in her orchard with a satanic cat….”

– From “The Witches: Salem, 1692” by Stacy Schiff (2015)