Telephone Trouble

To demonstrate how each of us make different interpretations with the information provided to us, our English class did The New York Time's "What’s Going On in This Picture" from October 26, 2020.

As a class, we came up with responses that varied significantly, each with sufficient reasoning. If all of us were to describe this image to one other person, that person would have a very confused and unclear understanding of the image. This person would have an extremely difficult time trying to pass on a description of this image to someone else. This effect is what the whole Telephone Game is based off of, where information keeps getting altered over time.

Effects like this that occur on a day-to-day basis are studied by many psychologists. Sometimes in rounds of the Telephone Game, players try to fill in the gaps of words that they didn't hear correctly. In a storytelling scenario, this phenomenon is referred to as confabulation.

Confabulation: the creation of false memories in the absence of intentions of deception

The key characteristic is that this type of fibbing isn't to deceive another person, but rather because the speaker cannot recall the information. Severe cases of confabulation are symptoms of Alzheimer's, dementia, and Korsakoff's syndrome. A contrasting syndrome is the Munchausen syndrome.

Munchausen Syndrome: Falsely claiming that another person has physical or psychological signs or symptoms of illness, or causes injury or disease in another person with the intention of deceiving others.

Unlike confabulation, the Munchausen syndrome is characterized by the intention to deceive another person with false claims. With so many syndromes and effects present today to describe how people make things up, there's a lot of misinformation being spread around. Make sure to give extra thought to what people tell you, because it may not always be true to the original content, especially in a round of Telephone.