Of Testimony and Mythology

[Hagoth]

I have commented several times in this forum about how the statements of young people, when they talk about their attempts at determining the truth of the Book of Mormon or other aspects of the church, seem to differ qualitatively from the memories of older members, who appear to have had much more powerful, specific and memorable experiences.

I'm reading a book called When They Severed Earth From Sky, about how myth is generated. The authors refer to the work of a researcher named Michael Schudson who did some experimental investigation (not explicitly described) about how we create myth in our own lives. Schudson points out several cognitive processes that people use to mythologize their own experience. I think some of the results of his study do a pretty good job of answering my own observations.

Some of the processes Schudson points out are:

Conventionalization: adults remember from their own lives, not what they experienced but what they are conventionally supposed to have experienced.

Narriaivisation: an effort not only to report the past but to make it interesting by encapsulating it in a cultural form. You can't pack in all of the details, so you keep only those that fit the proper convention/expectation.

Instrumentation: memory selects and distorts in the service of present interests.

When I have some more time I would like to learn about the experimental process Schudson used to draw these conclusions. If you know more about this, please fill us in.

[Reuben]

Conventionalization: adults remember from their own lives, not what they experienced but what they are conventionally supposed to have experienced.

Narritivisation: an effort not only to report the past but to make it interesting by encapsulating it in a cultural form. You can't pack in all of the details, so you keep only those that fit the proper convention/expectation.

Instrumentation: memory selects and distorts in the service of present interests.

When I have some more time I would like to learn about the experimental process Schudson used to draw these conclusions. If you know more about this, please fill us in.

Those three things you list are most of the reasons I give for taking every conversion and deconversion story with a block of salt. Regarding the first two, it doesn't take most people very long to pick up on the script they're supposed to use to communicate with a new group. (Some of us don't seem to have that useful power, making every use of a new script painfully intentional.) The other one I bring up is a form of motivated reasoning: all of us are inclined to think and communicate in a way that (respectively) makes us happy with and justifies our current choices. This often takes the form of "worst then vs. best now" comparisons.

It's really interesting to me to listen to testimonies or read the exmo subreddit with this stuff in mind. The stories are almost never outright false, just slanted in specific, predictable ways.

Regarding instrumentation: I don't recall this term, but terminology does vary between fields and subfields - or I might have just forgotten. In what I've read, it's usually called "motivated <some cognitive process>," as in "motivated recall," "motivated forgetting," and "motivated reasoning." Searching for those terms along with "psychology" or "research" will find a lot of papers. (It seems that pretty much all of our cognition is motivated, which is sobering and a bit disturbing.) Another good search term is "self-deception."

[moksha]

There is probably some overlap between those who could be called accurate historians and those who are able to come up with miraculous stories for General Conference.

Mythology and symbolism can help us perceive the world around us outside of our own limited senses. The abstract concepts that arise can increase our awareness beyond sight, smell, sound, and touch.