What does Mr. Monopoly, the mascot of the board game classic, look like? Many remember the logo of an elderly man with a moustache, top hat and monocle. However, the memory is deceptive: Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle. Reports of incorrectly remembered logos and images are piling up on the Internet. It was there that this observed phenomenon of visual Mandela effect was baptized. The name comes from the fact that several people mistakenly remember that the civil rights activist Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. Now the researchers Wilma Bainbridge and Deeprasi Prasad from the US University of Chicago have proven for the first time that the effect exists - and many people remember it incorrectly in a similar way. Their results have been published in a preliminary publication, the final version of which will be published in the journal "Psychological Science".
100 test subjects should differentiate between originals and manipulated versions of well -known symbols and pop cultural figures. In addition to Mr. Monopoly, they received the VW logo and the flagship Pokémon Pikachu from the Japanese anime series. The subjects decided on the changed images, who is believed that it is the originals. When they were supposed to trace the logos in a further attempt, almost every second picture contained the same incorrectly remembered characteristics - such as Mr. Monopolys Monocle or Pikachu with blackened tail tip.
However, the researchers were unable to clarify how the Mandela effect came about: The theory that the false memories arise on the basis of imprinted ideas only applied to a few of the logos. An eye-tracking experiment also showed that the subjects looked at all images equally attentively and in a similar way. Possibly, the researchers concluded, the Mandela images were simply more memorable than the originals.
