¶ … individuals who see and later recall the same event produce markedly discrepant accounts. Aside from motivational factors (such as dishonesty) or personal differences in memory capacity there are a number of factors relevant to affecting the accuracy information recalled from long-term memory. One of the first things to consider when comparing different recollections of the same events is to consider under what conditions the respondents encoded the information which they later recalled. Important encoding conditions include the length of time the incident occurred (longer events result in more accurate recall) and any possible distracting circumstances that were present during the event that could interfere with encoding. However, perhaps the most important consideration concerns the preconceived notions of the eye of the beholder. A person encoding information that will be stored into long-term memory is not like a video camera. People view the world through preconceived notions or schema that frame and allow them to make sense of their world. One manger with a schema that the organization for which they work treats employees fair and impartially will interpret the same series of events differently than one who maintains a personal schema of a company that is unfair and looks to exploit its employees. Likewise mangers' attitudes about specific individuals will affect the accuracy of their recall. A manger that was particularly close to a terminated employee or one that resigns may tell a different story about the events surrounding that incident than one who did not like or know...
Encoding of events (what information is attended to) and retrieval (how the information is recalled) of events will both be affected by these pre-existing schemata.
We also need to consider that recall from memory is a reconstructive process. Every time one recalls a past incident one recreates the memory on both cognitive and neurobiological levels. For instance, a in a recent study a false childhood memory was accepted as genuine by a third of college students who received it along with descriptions of accurate childhood events complied by their parents. The recall of this false event was intertwined with actual childhood experiences and unknowingly accepted and presented as genuine by subjects (Schultz, 2001). This new albeit false memory became a real event for these students. It is quite easy for this to happen in the current situation. When managers discuss events with other managers or with us, their recollections are open to interference by the biases of others and from their own attitudes. It is important to consider how much collaboration between managers has occurred when considering widely discrepant managerial reports of the same events.
Several additional factors are important to consider when attempting to understand the discrepancies in the managers' reports. First, we need to be careful not to assign more weight to recollections that are given with a high level of confidence as this does not appear to be associated with the accuracy of recall (Haber & Haber, 2000). Secondly, the length of time between the event and…
