Misinformation effect

Biological Parallel

When an African elephant matriarch signals danger at a watering hole, information-cascades ripple through the herd in under 3 minutes—and every elephant updates its mental map, overwriting prior safe-zone memory. This cultural-transmission through herding behavior appears across wildebeest migrations and bison stampedes: social signals from trusted group members carry more predictive weight than aging individual recall. Memory reconsolidation makes this possible—each retrieval is a rewriting opportunity where new data integrates with old. Loftus showed 75% of people incorporate misleading post-event details into original memories. The misinformation effect is adaptive updating, not cognitive weakness—brains bet that recent corroborated information predicts future reality better than isolated, aging memory.