'Luke, I am your father'

By Jason Lim

Until recently, I could have sworn that the above line from "Return of the Jedi" was uttered by Darth Vader as Luke, a newly minted Jedi, boarded the Death Star to take down the evil Emperor Palpatine. It's a belief shared by many Star Wars fans, including my eight-year-old son. Apparently, we were all wrong. The actual line was, "No, I am your father." And it didn't happen at the final encounter. It happened way before when Luke initially had his hand chopped off by Darth Vader.

Such a phenomenon is coined the "Mandela Effect." As a recent article by Quartz explains, "In 2009, Fiona Broome, an author of several "how-to books about ghost hunting," found herself in a conversation at Dragon Con, a yearly pop culture convention, with a group of people who shared specific memories of Nelson Mandela's death in the 1980s, including scenes from the televised funeral and a speech by his widow. But when Broome was having that conversation, Mandela was alive. It wasn't until 2013 that the South African leader passed away. And it wasn't just Broome who believed Mandela's death in the 1980s to be a fact."

The Mandela funeral wasn't one that I was victimized by. However, I did think the queen in Snow White said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall…" instead of "Magic mirror on the wall…" and that Jif Peanut Butter was Jiffy Peanut Butter. In fact, Broome hosts a site called, "mandelaeffect.com" that lists the top Mandela Effects that people have reported over the years.

Reading about the Mandela Effect reminded me of the gold vs. blue dress debate that swept the social media world several years back. Remember the dress? Some of us swore that the dress was gold and white while others declared equally vehemently that the dress was blue and black. The real "objective" answer was the latter, although I still see the dress as gold and white. This phenomenon happened because the human brain, when faced with uncertain or conflicting information, makes assumptions based on what it's most familiar with because of previous encounters.

Writing in Slate in 2017, Pascal Wallisch hypothesizes that people's sleeping habits determine whether they are more exposed to sunlight or not, leading to the natural assumption that the dress is in the shade of sunlight. This resulted in the brain automatically subtracting out the short wave-length light (to compensate for the assumed shade) to show the dress as gold and white. The night owls, who are not as "familiar" with sunlight, wouldn't make the same subconscious assumption and see the dress as blue and black, its true colors.

Wallisch writes, "Now, why would some people assume one set of lighting conditions and others a different one? That probably depends on the viewing history of the individual observer. How would one study that? One can hardly ask people if they are exposed to more short- or more long-wavelength light.

Chances are that most people wouldn't know and definitely would not be able to assess how their histories of light perception are different relative to other people. I could make one confident prediction, though: All else being equal, people who rise early ("larks") and go to bed at a reasonable time should be exposed to more daylight than those who rise late and go to bed later ("owls"). In contrast, owls could be expected to experience relatively more incandescent light than larks.

Such examples reinforce the emerging findings from neuroscience that have shown, as written by David Brooks, that "human decision-making is powerfully influenced by our social contexts ― by the frames, biases and filters that are shared subconsciously by those around … Psychologists have shown that we are organized by our attachments. Sociologists have shown the power of social networks to affect individual behavior."

In short, our decision-making depends upon the social and cultural contexts in which we are embedded. In fact, we can't really observe a phenomenon, remember an event or make a decision apart from what we have learned from our community, institutions and social fabric. It's actually even deeper than this. Geneticists have even shown that our behavior is influenced by our ancestors and the exigencies of the past that we inherit through epigenetics ― this will also inform how we "know" the world.

As we say goodbye to the old decade and welcome in the new one, it may be helpful to remind ourselves to be, first and foremost, humble, in full knowledge that no one's North Star is really the true one. While not advocating a nihilistic, free-for-all Hobbesian world that's short, brutish and violent ― since a minimum level of social and political agreement needs to be enforced to protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us ― it might not hurt to occasionally look into the mirror and ask, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose truth am I overlooking today?"

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.