Discussion
The errors made in each successive telling of the story are usually quite
predictable and follow some basic principles of constructive memory.
First, the story gets progressively shorter as some details, such as the
name of the revolutionary group and sometimes the flight’s origin and
destination are left out. This is referred to as leveling.
Second, some details—perhaps the caliber of the gun, or especially
for women students, the gender of the pilot—are often retained; this is
referred to as sharpening. Because individuals retain different details, this
leads to a discussion of the schemas already in long-term memory that
help us retain information in a meaningful fashion and how these schemas
differ for different people based on personal experience.
Third, because many elements of the story are encoded semantically
(i.e., as the meaning or gist of the story rather than as exact words),
they are likely to be altered in line with each teller’s schemas. For example,
because for many students, even today, pilots are men and flight
attendants are women, Jane Randall may end up as the flight attendant
and Jack Swanson may become the pilot. Further, the hijacker is almost
always referred to as a man, often as an Arab, even though no gender or
ethnic information is in the story. You can relate this phenomenon to false
assumptions made about the identity of those who blew up the federal
building in Oklahoma City in 1995. “The open cockpit door” may evoke an
image of an outside door, such that the hijacker is described as falling out
of the plane. Finally, the schema of “angry passengers” may cause expansion
of the story to include their beating, or even killing, the hijacker.