Memory is very easy to manipulate and not one memory is remembered perfectly.There are many theories and ideas that can explain why Jim was completely wrong about his memory about his parent winning the lottery. The first theory that can explain why Jim remembered this particular memory incorrectly is the decay theory. Decay theory states that information that people encode is forgotten over time if they do not rehearse it, or enforce the information. Jim not rehearsing this event continously may have caused him to forget details about this particular memory. A second theory that explains why Jim was incorrect about the information from his memory is interference. There are two different types of interference retroactive interferece, new information …show more content…
Furthermore, Jim could've encoded the information at the time completely wrong, this is because encoding has the most problems in the memory processing process. Jim being around his family when they won the lottery could've caused him to encode the information wrong, because there is alot going on at the time of the event happening such as the football game being on, Jim could've mistakenly interpreted information. Continuing, Jim could be experiencing cue-dependent forgetting, which is the inability to retrieve information stored because of insufficient cues for recall. Jim may need a specific or multiple cues to remeber the event exactly how it happened such cues could be watching the exact game that was going on when his parents won, hearing his parents yelling from excitement, playing the same board game with his sibling, or simply seeing the lottery ticket. In addition, Jim was in a specific emotional, physical state, or mood when the event happened and he is unable to recall the event because he's not in the same …show more content…
If Jim was 3 years or younger he would be unable to recall his parents winning the lottery with precision because children 3 or younger are unable to recall most of their memories before this age. Being interviewed after his parents may have played a role in Jim being unable to recall this event because the interviewer could've asked Jim misleading questions, questions that lead to an innaccurate recall, such as if Jim was bought t he ticket or if he was the one who scratched it. Jim may have not been in the same room with his parents when they won the lottery this can lead to the source monitoring confusion, lack of clarity about the origin of the memory. Jim may have been watching his parents on televison being interviewed about them winning the lottery and Jim may have a loving passion towards football, because of this Jim can easily confuse where the source of the memory comes from because he can invision him watching a football game instead of his parents winning the lottery. The final reason as to why Jim was wrong about this memory was that is was falsely implemented in him by someone
This statement reveals that the lottery is a tradition in town that they characters were born into believing in. None of the characters have lived a life where the lottery did not exist, thus this occasion is a normality to them. Summers had spoke frequently to the town about making a new box, “But no one liked to upset as much tradition as was represented by the black box. […] Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about the new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything being done” (Jackson 1). This paragraph in the text reiterates the town’s inability to stray away from the ritual of their
“If you choose not to decide, you have still made a choice.” --Blaise Pascal. This quote means when you give up the chance to make the decision, you 've already make the decision to stand aside indifferently, and trying to ignore the fact that you could 've done something better with that. This related to her most famous story is "The Lottery" (1948), the time period which is not long after the Great Depression and World War II. These two events changed the mentality of the whole society, people started the idea of "man for himself", in order to survive in the community. This works a straightforward manner to metaphor human cruelty and ignorance. Shirley Jackson (1919 -1965), an American novelist and short story writer. The theme of most
The human brain fills in the gaps of memories-a few key details will be remembered, and the brain will imagine the rest of the occasion based upon those memories. It fills in those details quickly, and we don't even notice. We notice the presence of certain good or bad things, but not the absence of them when we make decisions.
Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" presents conflict on more than one level. The most important conflict in the story is between the subject matter and the way the story is told. From the beginning Jackson takes great pains to present her short story as a folksy piece of Americana. Slowly it dawns on us, the terrible outcome of what she describes.
“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy” (William Hazlitt). The lottery by Shirley Jackson took place in the 1948, After WWII, people were still afraid to go into war again, on august 6 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and 3 days later another one on Nagasaki people were afraid. there was a lot of inhumanity at the time and The lottery shows a lot of what's happening at this time. "The Lottery" explores sudden shifts in opinion and friendship, giving the theme of hypocrisy, friendships and opinions mean nothing, they are all hollow, through the story you can see people's true nature and how they change the way they acted contradicting things they had said and done
Characters of "The Lottery" carry on a horrifying tradition without question. One character explains why they carry on the tradition of the lottery. He is an old man who has participated in the ritual for 77 years. He believes that trouble comes when you end the lottery. They honor the tradition to ensure the success of the community. He explains "Lottery in June, corn heavy soon..." ("The Lottery Part 2 of 1."). The community participates in fear of the consequences of ending the lottery. This example of superstition provides the viewer understanding of why people continue outdated traditions. People take part in outdated rituals out of fear of abandoning it. Jackson expands the idea by having the characters pass on the tradition to
The lottery is a fictional story of blindly following an old tradition, in this case to have rain fall for a good crop and harvest that year, people once a year coming together and drawing their fate if they would be sacrificed that year. This is a social problem due to blindly following from sheep mentality even stoning your own mother near the end where, “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.” A small child was just carelessly asked or even encouraged to do so. The shock factor from the villagers seeing themselves as free from guilt because of the blind drawing where no one person could be at fault is a little disturbing, no one is questioning the tradition because no single person feels it is their own personal issue with murdering an innocent person. They even feel like they are obligated, running up and being even slightly enthusiastic about it, “Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”
Family relationsips are challenged in a great number of ways that become broken. Family relations are challenged in the two stories. The Lottery and the Crash. The families in both stories are close up until a certain point. The lottery is a very intense story as the Lottery isnt actually what a may seem, you dont actually win a lottery in a good way. Family gets picked and one of the members in the family gets stoned to death as they pick a letter with a black dot. In the crash racism effects the family relations
One of the smaller moments was when “ someone gave little Davey Hutchinson a few pebbles.”(567) , someone out of all the people in the town gave him pebbles.For the purpose to ease him into the killing of his mother and to make Davey understand the cruelty that is the lottery. It is hard to understand the lottery when one is young, so some spared him the explanation and handed him the pebbles. With children the tradition that is the lottery seems to harsh, but the other children go along with it. So the idea that The Lottery is devoid emotion seems to affect children more since they do not understand the tradition
"The Lottery" is a short story that shows just how disturbing the human mind can be at times. As the story proceeds it builds the reader up till the end where what you thought was going to happen did not turn out that way. But is that not how our lives are portrayed? Do we not build ourselves up to society believing what they say and do until the matter is put into our hands? Mrs. Hutchinson was a follower of society just like we are. Everyday was the same routine and every year she played the lottery just like all of the other town people. But this year would be a very different year for Mrs. Hutchinson because her chance at the lottery was about to happen. Now as a reader in this day, we would think of the lottery to be a great prize to receive but not during the days of these town people.
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera” (Walker, 2013). In fact, human memory is quite the opposite of a video camera; it can be greatly influenced and even often distorted by interactions with its surroundings (Walker, 2013). Memory is separated into three different phases. The first phase is acquisition, which is when information is first entered into memory or the perception of an event (Samaha, 2011). The next phase is retention. Retention is the process of storing information during the period of time between the event and the recollection of a piece of information from that event (Samaha, 2011). The last stage is retrieval. Retrieval is recalling stored information about an event with the purpose of making an identification of a person in that event (Samaha, 2011).
The lottery itself is well described in the following quotes: “The lottery was conducted--as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program--by Mr. Summers. who had time and energy to devote to civic activities.” and, “A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and
Throughout the story of the lottery the villagers all conform to a tradition where they no longer remember the reasoning for participating. Coulthard says the lottery is “a transparent attack on blind obedience to tradition that little or no exegesis tradition. “ (Coulthard 1). Shirley Jackson creates the lottery to show how these characters mindlessly
The Lottery is a story filled with rituals and traditions. The problem with traditions is we will often continue in them without even knowing why we do them to begin with. In the case of the villagers, the lottery had been going on for longer than any of them had been alive. Jackson illustrates in the story that it started so long ago that the equipment first use had long since been lost (Pg. 258 para. 5). The people of the village are very set in their ways; when the topic of change comes up they are very quick to dismiss it as foolishness. This mindset shows up multiple times throughout the story. Towards the beginning of the story, the black box used for the lottery is mentioned and it is indicated that "Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box" (pg 258-259 para. 5). The villagers for the most part didn't question the moral implications of the lottery; being born and raised into the lottery it's all they ever knew. They had little knowledge of any other way things could be to serve as their moral compass. The story reminds me of a similar situation from my childhood. As a child I used to spend a lot of time around my grandfather Jay. He was born and raised in Arkansas in the 1920's. Being...
Lastly, there is the Ethical criticism approach to literature and in this approach it defines a literary work by what moral and ethical judgements it possess and promotes. In the Ethical approach critics “may range from a casual appraisal of a work’s moral content to the ore rigorous and systematic analysis driven by a coherent set of stated beliefs and assumptions”. In Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” I felt that Tan, intends to make the reader think of the meaning behind the story. She doesn’t speak out to illustrate what is the real problem between her and her mother but instead she uses her own point of view as a narrator to state what she has experienced and what she feels in her mind all along the story. She has not judged what is right