In this article I’ll explain the result of the combination of two psychological phenomena, the false memories and the social proof. Which will both lead to something problematic, the nostalgia hype, which will creates insatiable and unrealistic needs in people’s mind.

Our brain isn’t able to store everything, it would be too much informations, and even when he stores something it’s not complete. Our brain is very likely to fill the holes of a memory, in creating false memory, mostly it’s just to fill minor details, such as how was dressed a person, how tall was he, the weather…

For example he doesn’t store our eyes movements, it’s called “Visual perception of the movement during saccadic eye movements” so when we remember something in which we move it’s the brain itself which recreate this movement. It doesn’t seem impactful at the first glance, but it can turn into biggest proportions, because for us the substitute memories created by our brain are real, we’re persuaded that we saw these.

Let’s take a look at Elizabeth Loftus works, she is an American cognitive psychologist specialized on human memory, she conducted research that shows how suggestion and imagination created memories of events that didn’t actually occur.

Through several studies she demonstrated how a false memory can be implemented by an external event or person or even by a self-pressure by trying to remember something, from car crash witnesses to childhood events she worked on different contexts.

FALSE MEMORIES are often created by combining actual memories with suggestions received from others. The memory of a happy childhood outing to the beach with father and grandfather, for instance, can be distorted by a suggestion, perhaps from a relative, into a memory of being afraid or lost. False memories also can be induced when a person is encouraged to.

A simple question formulation can totally influence memories, it’s something impactful in the justice field as you can guess. Testimonies, confessions and charges can be influenced, older they are more vulnerable they can be.

But why should we also worry about this phenomenon in user experience?

Human has a subjective vision, we’re not reasonable and objective as we think we are. We could maybe didn’t even experiment happy memory that we’ve stored, making our needs corrupted. In user experience having a vulnerable and probably corrupted memory can leads to false needs.

Human needs are in part, formed on what they previously experimented, for example;

“Oh, this chocolate brand tasted so good when I ate some during my childhood at Christmas, and I finally find them in a store!”.

But in fact this person is highly influenced by a general positive memory of Christmas with his family, seeing this brand directly remembered this pleasant time. This chocolate might be not even good but that doesn’t matter, his brain didn’t not remember this part so he filled that empty hole with something similar of positive memories felt at this moment. The nostalgia is the most vulnerable feeling of false memories, since past memories are too.

Trying to remember too hard an experience might corrupt it with the general feeling felt at this moment, it can be compared of this feeling of liking a whole thing because we just loved one part of it. It’s even more worrying when we know that phenomenon is increased when other people take place, specially at our time of social medias.

False memories are constructed by combining actual memories with the content of suggestions received from others. During the process, individuals may forget the source of the information.

There is also another psychological phenomenon playing a role, it’s the Social proof. Firstly explained by Robert B. Cialdini in Influence: Science and Practice, it says

“how people can be guided by other people’s behavior, so we can represent the actions, beliefs, and advice of the crowd in a design to influence users.”

We take people as reference, consciously or unconsciously, they guide our own behaviour, it’s a survival trait which allows us to act correctly.

One the most popular use of this trait is in sitcom shows, such as Friends, How I met your mother or even Big bang theory, they all play recorded laughs in funny moments, it has been proved that spectators laugh louder and more often when they are used. And it even works better on poor jokes.

Now let’s talk about the combination of these two psychological phenomenon; if you pair False memories with Social proofs, you obtain something spreading that you probably already met or maybe felt, it’s the nostalgia hype.

The nostalgia hype is initially formed by memories, old memories from childhood most of the time. We try to remember something previously experimented, it can be anything, but in this article I’ll focus on a video game example. This experimented thing comes from a distant past, we cannot remember correctly every shade of this experience, so we try harder and then it’s at this point that false memories are born. Since our memory is full of holes, our brain will fill them with mostly positive memories because we want, in ourselves, remember this as a positive experience.

But why do we want to remember this as a positive experience?

Because of the Social Proof. Because we get influenced by other people, from internet or from relatives that think this product was awesome back then.

This is where it starts to be out of hands, when these two phenomenons start helping each other we totally fall for nostalgia hype, almost whatever what it is, if we had a single slice of positive sensation with it back then we will totally love it and want it back right now if false memory and social proof are triggered.

False memory & the social proof are two psychological phenomenons forming a dangerous cocktail, served by, and for our brain.

Our brain totally lost any kind of consideration for the context of for moment that we liked this product, for a videogame for example, we might have a nostalgia hype for something which were fine back then, but if you put this videogame in the hands of someone who never experimented it he will probably not even plays it more than five minutes.

Why? Because it’s totally out of context for today’s standards, there is probably tons of problems such as UX frictions, rigid gameplay, random gameflow.. and all of these faults were vanished and replaced by good points by our false memory.

Almost everything has made progress through the years, video games, cars, social medias, job conditions… considerably changed and evolved for something more optimal for our needs, so having corrupted needs will cause an dissatisfaction at the end, because this product is made to satisfy old needs, not the ones we are feeling right now.

Let’s take a look at a recent huge nostalgia hype trigger; this November, 3rd Blizzard announced something totally unexpected. They will bring back WoW Vanilla (the original version of 2004, without any additional content or extension, also called WoW Classic).

Of course this drove the videogame community crazy: