The Mandela Effect Debunked

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1. Unfalsifiable

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

— Hitchens's Razor

Extraordinary claims without evidence can be disregarded without reference to counter-evidence. The claims of the Mandela Effect believers, although well-intentioned, are unfalsifiable. They assert the Mandela Effect explains their apparent discrepancies even though the theory cannot be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of any physical experiment.

When one so-called effect is debunked, they move on to the next one.

Nothing can prove it wrong. Just as nothing can prove that aliens aren’t abducting unicorns to vaccinate them against chemtrails. The person making the claim owns the burden of proof. There is no obligation on behalf of the skeptic to provide evidence to counter such a claim.

2. Mandela Effects and Miracles

Miracle: an extraordinary and astonishing happening that is attributed to the presence and action of an ultimate or divine power.

Why do people want the Mandela Effect to be true? Because it is miraculous. People choose to believe in miracles for many reasons. It’s an escape from objective reality over which we are ostensibly powerless. Miracles make us players in a bigger, cosmic game.

Miracles are comforting, validating, and life-changing. The Mandela Effect is a miraculous occurrence. To experience a Mandela Effect is to have penetrated the programming of the matrix and gleaned insights into the holographic, shifting, and subjective nature of reality.

Miracles have traditionally been associated with religions as their claims to authenticity. The performance of miracles in front of witnesses is all it takes to start a cult of believers.

Cults of believers provide all the social and cognitive reinforcement required to ensure the group grows. So long as the miracles are legitimate and the faith is strong, the cult will persist. Such an aggregate of believers gains confidence and even belligerence as their numbers reinforce the meaningfulness of the miracle that brought them all together.

3. What Causes The Mandela Effect

The Mandela Effect is caused by faulty eyewitness testimony influenced by the suggestions of the person who is pointing out the supposed discrepancy. It’s not a paradigm-shattering revelation. It only appears that way to those who are affected.

A million people misremembering can add the illusion of credibility to any supposed Mandela Effect. It only takes a fraction of the population to misremember something for a viral video on the topic to get a show of support in favor of the supposed discrepancy.

"It has long been speculated that mistaken eyewitness identification plays a major role in the wrongful conviction of innocent individuals. A growing body of research now supports this speculation, indicating that mistaken eyewitness identification is responsible for more convictions of the innocent than all other factors combined..” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_memory

"The Innocence Project determined that 75% of the 239 DNA exoneration cases had occurred due to inaccurate eyewitness testimony. It is important to inform the public about the flawed nature of eyewitness memory and the difficulties relating to its use in the criminal justice system so that eyewitness accounts are not viewed as the absolute truth."

The suggestion of a discrepancy is all it takes. That suggestion of a misperception is an example of gaslighting, a subtle form of psychological abuse where the victim is caused to doubt their sanity and perception.

When someone asks, "Are you sure you know that?" it chips at your confidence in your perceptions.

4. Interrogator Bias

The interrogator framing the question has great power to influence what is recollected. For example, if an interrogator asks, “Notice anything strange about your favorite brand of peanut butter?” The answer would mostly be unrelated to the Mandela Effect.

Now, if the question is posed as a binary such as, “Do you remember that famous brand of peanut butter as Jiff or Jiffy?” then you have to choose a side: was it Jiffy or Jiff?

When such a question is asked, your cognitive bias toward what feels right will naturally lead to a confident response. That initial confidence plus the interrogator bias reinforces that answer. In the absence of counter-evidence, they have no reason to doubt their recollection.

The problem is, that there is no counter-evidence. Either they remember it right and the evidence confirms this or they are wrong but their bias will now attach them to that wrong answer.

This is a subtle sleight of mind trick. The Mandela believer is telling you to doubt your perceptions; to accept the premise that reality is fake.

5. Contaminated Witnesses

"Witnesses can be subject to memory distortions that can alter their account of events. It is of particular interest that the memory of an eyewitness can become compromised by other information, such that an individual's memory becomes biased."

The Mandela Effected interrogator is contaminating the witnesses. This is called retroactive interference.

"Another phenomenon that may interfere with an eyewitness' memory is retroactive interference. This occurs when new information is processed which obstructs the retrieval of old information. A common source of interference that may occur after the event of a crime is the reporting of the crime. Police investigations include questioning that is often suggestive. The processing of new information may disrupt or entirely replace old information.” Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_memory

The matter is further complicated when large numbers of people who are in total agreement about something they are wrong about introduce social and cognitive reinforcements of those incorrect memories. There’s no penalty for being wrong; in fact, it’s incentivized.

Individuals are not only capable of being wrong but are capable of defending their wrongness once it becomes entrenched as dogma.

6. False Memories

1. You don’t have to debunk every asserted Mandela Effect. It has not been proven to exist so there is no reason to examine each one independently, as it has been categorically debunked. One trick they use is to run by a list of alleged effects until one finds one they resonate with. The chances are good that one may find a misconception or vague memory which can then be toyed with.

2. Mandela Effects are based on vague memories that are recalled by the conspiracy theorist who then compares them to more recent, altered versions of the same logo, person, or event. Childhood memories are especially susceptible to this manipulation. For example “Froot Loops” cereal is claimed to have changed from “Fruit Loops.” The adult knows that “fruit” is not spelled '“Froot,” but a child may not. The adult will see “Froot Loops” as incorrect and may assume, incorrectly, that the spelling changed. The truth is, you can't trademark protect a brand name that's made of common words, so companies must purposely spell their brand names wrong so that it's unique enough to win trademark protection.

3. Mandela Effect memories are shallow and fake. The claim, “Everybody knows Timmy fell down the well,” is never followed by an explanation of how they got him out of the well.

4. When one is prompted to remember a logo they saw years prior alongside an altered version of it, their recollection is now tainted by the recent version. The new version is stored along with the original memory and because it’s newer, it feels more legitimate than the original. This is the basis of false memory formation, or The Misinformation Effect, which is indistinguishable from The Mandela Effect.

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Tim Ozman,

IPR Host