Beware of the Mandela effect

Fiona Broome coined the term ‘The Mandela Effect’ back in 2009.

She was convinced that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. But he was very much alive and only perished officially in 2013. But before you make fun of her for that bizarre misunderstanding, realize that millions of people around the world shared her delusion, which is what it takes for a particular situation to fit the ‘Mandela effect’ descriptor.

The Mandela effect is a scenario where multiple people strongly believe that something false is real. They repeat it so frequently to other people, who cannot help but take that false element as fact.

This concept is especially common in entertainment. If you are entertainment-savvy, you have probably encountered or even used the term “Beam me up, Scotty,” which is attributed to Captain Kirk (William Shatner) from the original Star Trek.

But Kirk has never uttered that phrase. Your favourite show as a child was Looney Tunes, not Looney Toons. Many people think Mickey Mouse has suspenders. He does not. That famous line from The Empire Strikes Back is “No, I am your father,” not “Luke, I’m your father.”

At no point in the original animated Snow White does the Evil Queen say, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Instead, she says, “Magic Mirror on the wall.” C3PO in the original Star Wars has a silver leg.

His body is not completely gold like most of us remember. Here is the most shocking example of the Mandela effect. Many of us grew up believing that Sinbad (the African American comedian) played a genie in a film called Shazam. But no such movie exists.

But then, why do we distinctly remember Sinbad playing the genie in a movie that does not even exist? No one knows. The Mandela effect is still a mystery. One person misremembering recent history is understandable. Multiple people running around with the same falsehoods makes no sense.

Why are we all convinced that the Monopoly Man on the cover of the Monopoly board game has a monocle when he does not? Why do we share the same delusion? Some scholars have blamed this phenomenon on the way our brains process information.

We don’t see what is actually there. Rather, we see what we think should be there. This manifests frequently in that popular false memory test where someone shows you a list of words or items for a second or two and then commands you to recall them.

If you show people sewing-related items, such as a needle and a thread, they will remember sewing-related items that are not on the list because they expect those objects to be there. Researchers have also theorized that people remember what they strongly believe.

Think back to all the times you have seen a controversial story on the news regarding a subject you care about (typically politics). If you watch it again today, you will notice that, whenever you recounted that story to someone else, you added details the news did not even hint at but which you believed must have happened.

You observe the same phenomenon when two people argue in your presence. When they explain what happened to someone else, they add new information to the argument, seemingly crafting new insults and accusations their opponent never uttered.

This shows that human memories are malleable and untrustworthy. People will believe whatever they have decided to believe. So, the next time someone tries to regale you with stories about something someone else did, take their word with a grain of salt. Just because they believe every word coming out of their mouth does not mean it’s the truth.

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