'Memory is simply biased, inaccurate history.' Discuss - Essay Example

Memory denotes a distinctive and new field of study and a new method of conceptualization of the history as a generic field of inquiry (Cubitt, 2007). History is fundamentally remembered by the new generation by reading the accounts of the historians. It is not uncommon to find the pieces of literature giving completely different information from each other though they are all related to the same event. The main reason why there is so much difference between the historic accounts related to the same events is that different historians have made their accounts solely depending on their own memories.

This paper discusses the statement “memory is simply biased, inaccurate history” drawing upon the elements that incorporate biasness in the memory and make its status as history inaccurate. In the recent years, the notion of memory has attained the status of a leading term in the cultural history. The notion of memory is used with varying levels of sophistication and is practiced more than theorized. It has been used to study the memory of people that experienced such great and memorable events as the Holocaust survivors (Confino, 1997, p. 1386). In addition to that, memory has denoted past’s representation and its making into a knowledge of shared culture by the successive generations in such vehicles of memory as films, books, commemorations, and different forms and mediums of literature.

The pageantry surrounding the British monarchy in the manifestations of its public ceremonies are seemingly the most ancient and related to an immemorial past. It is a product of the last two centuries in its modern form. Traditions that claim to be ancient are sometimes invented or are recently made. People who know about the colleges of the ancient British universities can visualize these traditions on a local scale (Hobsbawm, 1983, p. 1). Along with the rapid advancement of the world, the study of nationalism has also undergone a massive transformation in terms of scale, quantity, method, and level of sophistication (Anderson, 1983, p. xii). There is a tendency in human beings known as confirmation bias that causes them to favor the information by which their beliefs are confirmed.

People make use of the confirmation bias upon collecting or remembering the information in a selective manner or while interpreting the information in a biased manner. Issues that are emotionally charged have a stronger effect as well as for the beliefs that are deeply entrenched. For instance, people generally use the sources that are in favor of their existing attitudes towards and perceptions of politics. Ambiguous evidence is also interpreted as supportive of people’s existing position.

Memory, biased research, and interpretation have all been summoned to explain the polarization of behavior when different parties have the same evidence and yet they disagree with one another, perseverance of belief when it persists after the evidence has turned out to be false, illusionary correlation 0when people misunderstand the link between different events and situations, and the irrational primacy effect that refers to a greater reliance on the earlier encountered information in a series.

During the 1960s, a series of experiments showed how biased people are toward supporting their current beliefs. Results of these researches were re-interpreted later as a tendency to evaluate the concepts in a one-sided