For example, lets say that you were best friends with somebody for a couple of years, then you had a fight and fell out. When thinking about that person again, you are more likely to remember them as that jerk of an individual that you fell out with rather than that nice individual you had all those fun times with.
This occurs because your memories are now biased by your beliefs about that person, this is known as confirmation bias. The act of remembering things about this person is filtered by a process called 'selective recall' wherein you only remember the things about that person that match your beliefs.
Here is a short Youtube video that pretty much sums up confirmation bias.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xMaR8au-YU
Memories are not reliable. This can pose great issues for eyewitness testimonies in court. I watched a documentary on this over the Christmas and was surprised by how easily an account of whole group of witnesses could be changed by one person confidently providing wrong descriptions. They went from recalling the crime they witnessed pretty accurately to giving a completely wrong description the next day. The person who committed the crime was even in the room with them and they did not notice a thing!! The confidence of that one individual was enough to get them to believe statements about the crime that were not true at all and thus bias their memory of the event.
This just goes to show, you may think you remember what a person is like or an event that occurred but your memory of this could be very wrong indeed!
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