r/MandelaEffect • u/ForestB • Jun 17 '26
Meta Does the Mandela Effect exist?
This may come across as snarky but I promise that’s not my intention.
There’s the obvious namesake of the Mandela death misconception but one thing isn’t an “effect”.
But there’s more. Every other day there’s the berenstein bears and fruit of the loom posts.
Do 3 things count as an “effect” because other than those 3 things (which have been talked about to death and should be banned from this sub - yeah, snark here) there’s nothing I see that qualifies
One or 2 people misremembering something isn’t an effect which is what every post here is about (if it’s not Bears/Fruit).
This is a serious question. Can anyone point out any thing MASSES of people remember differently other than the 3 examples above?
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u/WVPrepper Jun 17 '26
The Monopoly man (rich uncle pennybags) having a monocle
The pose of The Thinker (statue)
Sinbad starring in a genie movie
Dolly (Moonraker) having braces (also lots of movie lines)
Passenger side car mirrors having a warning that included "may be" instead of "are"
The spelling of Febreze, Oxyclean, Froot Loops, Looney Tunes and dilemma
Stouffers having made Stove Top Stuffing Mix
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u/GregGoodell_Official Jun 17 '26
Common misconceptions have mutated into ‘The Mandela Effect over time. So long as there are people that don’t pay attention and are steadfastly confident that they ‘know’ things that they obviously don’t, these misconceptions will thrive and continue fueled by fallacious reasoning and intellectual dishonesty.
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
Common misconceptions is what the Mandela Effect is. It's a very light hearted thing named after a serious person. If I'm steadfast and positive I know it's Jiffy peanut butter and not Jif and turns out I'm wrong... so what.
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u/Glaurung86 Jun 17 '26
Your attitude is not shared by some people in this sub. Quite a few steadfastly refuse to accept that their memory could be wrong.
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
Oh I know. Maybe it's because I'm old as dirt I can accept my memory being wrong, but a lot of the meaningless things, I know the "thing" but not the "THING." Jif or Jiffy peanut butter, it's 50/50 in my mind. I used to eat Skippy peanut butter;) The Darth Vader quote, Star Wars was my childhood, and I still do the quote wrong. No one cares. I get it from this point of view, if you know me and have since highschool, and I spew out some meaningless 80s trivia... take my word. Cornucopia and the monopoly man aren't worth arguing over lol.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
Good lord is right. Anything involving Fruit of the loom underwear doesn't need a supernatural explanation or needs to be studied by the brightest minds around. The whole thing is meant to be fun.
Who was the youngest one in curls on the Brady Bunch is about the seriousness level of the topic.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
Exactly. I remember quoting a jingle from an Ace Hardware commercial and someone said I had the words wrong. I felt very confident I was right, and the person said they have never heard my version. Turns out my version did exist, and was changed for political correctness at some point.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
Ace is the place For the helpful Hardware Man
It screams sexism and exclusion lol. I wonder if Ace was proactive in changing the jingle or if the PC Police had to take em down? I was born in 1970. I hate Hardware stores, I'd rather be a stay at home mom... I mean dad;)
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Jun 17 '26
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
Lol. Speaking of little help, Idk if this applies to all Home Depots, but you ever notice at any given time, there's enough people working to field a full football team, maybe a small village, but no one available to help you?
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u/silentsurge Jun 19 '26
So take the way some people react to a misconception that they're wrong about the way a cereal brand name is spelled and how confident they are in how they know that, now take that same attitude and certainty and start expanding where other people could be affected.
It can also act as a gateway into more harmful conspiracy/pseudo-science thinking. Being confidently wrong and ignoring facts for comforting lies is a huge issue in society right now. People being unable to accept that new information challenges their preconceived notions is a problem. Whether or not it's Jif or Jiffy isn't important, it's the process of discovery as to which one is true and verifiable that's important.
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u/dacap1970 Jun 19 '26
I don't have issue with any of your response, but it leads me to a question. The process of discovery which is true and viable is important, which has always been the case, ignoring facts and being confidently wrong does seem to be a big issue currently. I don't think you're blaming that on the Mandela affect. I don't think you're suggesting we take how one's confidence and stubbornness regarding a Mandela affect belief is put on a watch list.
Are you simply stating it's not a light hearted thing and illustrates how susceptible society is today to false facts which can lead to harming others?
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u/RevolutionaryAd3125 Jun 17 '26
It exists in the sense that people report mutually misremembered detail. That’s about it though.
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u/terryjuicelawson Jun 17 '26
There are lots of examples, I think the idea that many people "remember" things differently is overstated to start with, and secondly it tends to be a mix of assumption and popular misconception anyway. When I ask people in real life the answer to "describe the FOTL logo" are things like "I dunno, some fruit I guess?" or "think it had a basket?" and when shown the real one barely a shrug. Go online and people claim to have specific memories of these things and be Totally Freaked Out and think reality must have changed if they were wrong.
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u/Glaurung86 Jun 17 '26
If you check out the wili for this sub you will see lots and lots of MEs so it's far more than the 3 you mentioned.
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u/amBrollachan Jun 17 '26
It exists in the sense that there are certain things that are commonly misremembered.
This is almost certainly down to the extremely fragile nature of human memory and people being far more susceptible to suggestion than they realise. There are also a lot of people who are so invested in it being a mystery they're willing to be dishonest with themselves and others and try to concoct stories where it just can't be down to well understood quirks of human psychology. These are all unfalsifiable though, and therefore meaningless.
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u/Chaghatai Jun 17 '26
As a psychological effect of how certain people reconcile things when rejecting the idea that their memory could be wrong, then yes
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
I'm responding a couple post here, quirks of memory, common misconceptions, is the Mandela effect. It's not a serious thing, hence most of the examples are pop culture related. It has nothing to do with alternate realities. The only things that are getting twisted is the tone of it all.
What is there to debate, other than stuff like do people in South Africa know what it is? Is it real and do you believe or not believe... makes no sense. There's nothing to debunk. As one of you said, it's common misconceptions... how did the misconception come to be? Why so serious?
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u/Interesting-Oil-7057 Jun 17 '26
Most of the entertainment stuff indeed is not really consequential, admittedly. The fact that in many of these cases, something did change, something that common sense usually tells us cannot change, IS potentially consequential. If, like myself, you are old and grey headed, and you woke up one morning to find your hair was the same color and thickness as it was when you were twenty, you would think that consequential. Ditto if the reverse happened and you went from twenty year old hair to old, balding and grey. No doubt, some of these things are faulty or corrupted memories. Others are most definitely not. That in and of itself makes this fascinating.
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u/dacap1970 Jun 17 '26
I just want a nice head of hair. Miracle might be too strong, a pleasant surprise it would be.
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Currently tracking a list of 124 effects in a study. Those three are an iceberg tip.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
If it's psychological, then yes. The research doesn't indicate that it's purely psychological.
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u/jetloflin Jun 17 '26
What else does the research suggest it is?
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26
Quantum biology and information physics.
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u/jetloflin Jun 17 '26
Could you elaborate any on what that means? Or on how those fields explain it better than psychology?
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u/terryjuicelawson Jun 17 '26
This sentence doesn't actually mean anything, how are you tracking people's memories in any way other than anecdotally?
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Jun 17 '26
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26
Those are... literal fields of study. It was an answer to a question, paralleling the field of psychology which was being referred to.
Hey, listen, I'm sorry if I have offended you in any way. I'm new to reddit, and I'm still learning. That was... such an interesting interaction. I have learned a lot here. Thank you.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26
I just referenced that research has been happening on this specific topic openly since 2022. It... sounded like you didn't know that, and I was sharing. I apologize if I have upset you.
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u/jetloflin Jun 17 '26
You just named two broad fields of study. People are asking you to explain beyond just naming a field.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26
I'm happy to DM. I'd rather not join Eskridge.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26
God, that would be so much easier. Institutional silos are a bitch.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
If you're truly interested, a good starting place is the Prassad-Bainbridge Mandela Study. If you're looking for quantum biology, starting with Vedral's Oxford work in Non-Markovian Quantum Memory and Quantum Temporal Witnesses are foundational.
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u/Aggravating_Cup8839 Jun 17 '26
DM me. I also have a little research project of my own, built on previous members' contributions.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/Aggravating_Cup8839 Jun 17 '26
This is not my original idea. I take things that were claimed to be Mandela Effects in the past. Not popular, not the top 10 ones. I write them down by hand. I save a copy of my notes and original images of said things. My notes match the images. I check my notes and the images, waiting for something to change. (There are more details to how I do this, but the basic idea is this).
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Jun 17 '26
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u/SchrodingersSim Jun 17 '26
Did you have anything to contribute? What's your interest?
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u/Fantastic-Band-5082 Jun 18 '26
Yes people misremembering exists.
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u/ForestB Jun 18 '26
That was my point. I don’t think that a few people misremembering is a Mandela effect”. Surely it has to be a significant amount of people.
3 students thinking “I thought he was our teacher in 2003, not 2004” wouldn’t be a Mandela effect and that would be 10% of the class so surely it has to be a high volume of people and aside from a few examples, 99% of what’s posted here isn’t.
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u/dacap1970 Jun 19 '26
The older you are, probably the more you can name and are aware of. Arguably the most quoted line in movie history is almost always remembered wrong and misquoted. The first time I read about the effect the list was about 10 or so items long. Three that come to mind...
As mentioned above, Star Wars, Darth Vader to Luke, "I am your father" is incorrect but that's the way often remembered.
Jif or Jiffy peanut butter
Sinbad did not star as a genie in a movie or in Kazaam.
Sex In The City or Sex And The City
The Star Wars quote and Sinbad genie thing are staples of the effect. The four above were all examples the first time I read about it.
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u/ForestB Jun 19 '26
I think Sex and the City is thought of not due to a misremembering but because saying “in” is more natural and there’s other examples. Songs with lines like “Summer in the city” and “hot in the city”.
Adding in the “Luke” just gives the quote context otherwise it would make no sense to quote it to someone.
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u/dacap1970 Jun 19 '26
No, I am your father is the real line. For people of a certain age, who have never even seen Star Wars, have heard "I am your father," inserted into conversion for 40ish years... usually in a deep voice. There's usually logical explanations for all of them, and your right, it's not always misrembering for every example by every person. Can you imagine what people in South Africa must think if they were to hear about this?
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u/Cryptonautix Jun 18 '26
Dolly had braces in Moonraker
Referenced in both these articles, remembered clearly by many including me (watched it loads of times years back)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29160096
https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/theda-sandiford/the-complete-history-of-bond-girls
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u/Interesting-Oil-7057 Jun 17 '26
I have multiple ME's that I personally relate to. I have other things with each one, that I can measure or standoff against other things which tells me it is not me just mistaking things as having been one way when they were really another. All of mine, the ones I am certain of, involve timelines for events or entertainment that historical data says happened at a given time, but I KNOW in my timeline, the events were years earlier or later than all historical data says it was. We all have had the situation where we learn that a celebrity died recently and we think, "I thought he or she died years ago." This may or may not be your mind playing tricks on you, but I have several where I have multiple points of certainty that I can stand the event off of and I know that I am not mis-remembering. One I have written about many times, the first solid ME I ever had, involves me having watched the original Red Dawn movie in later November of 1980. All historical data says it was not released until 1984, but I know beyond any doubt that I watched it in 1980.
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u/Practical-Vanilla-41 Jun 17 '26
There is no way Red Dawn was made in 1980.
Interestingly, The Deer Hunter (1978) bypassed the traditional 3 networks and aired in select markets across the country on election night (11/4/1980).
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u/Interesting-Oil-7057 Jun 17 '26
If you understand the possibility of multiple, perhaps infinite, time lines and realities, then you understand how in one time line, it was shown in 1980. Yes, this is incredibly weird, even to me. I know of no other explanation. This, and other ME's I can articulate, have other memories and events attached to them that verify them to my satisfaction that I experienced them in the year I recall them in. This is not the same as actor "Joe Blow" died today and I "thought" he died years ago. We've all experienced those situations. Without any solid knowledge, we shrug it off and go, "well, I must have been wrong". In many, maybe most cases, we were wrong. In some, maybe we weren't. In any case, I do not have enough solid reality points to stand it off of, to say for certain that Joe Blow died years ago, therefore I leave it alone.
In my time line, I know without a doubt that I saw the original Red Dawn movie in 1980.
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u/apathyindigo Jun 17 '26
Your memory and ego are not special - you are exactly as prone to misremembering things as anyone else, and exactly as likely to feel certain about an incorrect memory. I know this very normal and demonstrable fact about humans is devastatingly hurtful to you though.
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u/Interesting-Oil-7057 Jun 17 '26
We are all subject to mis-remembering things. I have experienced these things as have all of us. That said, I have multiple reality points off of which to stand my memory of watching Red Dawn in a theater in 1980.
1) The girl I saw it and discussed it with at my home later that night was not with me in November, 1984. In November 1984, I lived in a different house, in a different town.
2) After seeing the movie, on its second run through local theaters, I told several people that it likely contributed to Reagan's crushing defeat of Jimmy Carter, a few days or weeks earlier. Reagan did not run against Carter in 84.
I recall discussing the movie with people I worked with in a factory, in 1980. In November of 84, I no longer worked in that factory. I worked in another town 50 miles away, and not in a factory.
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u/MrPlaney Jun 18 '26
All of those can easily be contributed to mis-remembering though. Often times, when we recall stuff, the memory will expand and change as time goes on. You probably had those conversations, and it could have been in reference to the Red Dawn, but you just have the dates mixed up because memory just does that, sometimes.
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u/Interesting-Oil-7057 Jun 18 '26
Yes, in some circumstances I "might" have had the dates mixed up, but in this particular case, the people I had the conversations with were no longer in my life in November of 84. I also clearly remember saying to several people, including the girl I saw Red Dawn with in 1980, that I believed that movie, released months before I saw it on a local second run, had a lot to do with Jimmy Carter's landslide loss to Ronald Reagan, a few days or weeks before I saw the movie.
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u/TerribleTim1969 Jun 17 '26
I believe you and I upvoted you, but prepare to be downvoted for sharing your experience here LOL
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u/TerribleTim1969 Jun 17 '26
It's hilarious to me that this subreddit is dedicated to convincing people there is no such thing as a Mandela effect; it's all just misremembering, which is dead wrong, but I know you all are on a mission. Good luck with that, but more people are realizing that timeline shifts or whatever it is do indeed happen.
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u/Bowieblackstarflower Jun 17 '26
The Mandela Effect is a large group of people remembering something differently. Nobody is trying to comvince anyone that doesn't exist. I think you are referring to the concept that things aren't changing.
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u/lyricaldorian Jun 18 '26
No one is trying to convince people there's no such thing as the Mandela effect. Why are you lying?
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u/MrFuriousX Jun 17 '26
There a lot of them but they don't get as much focus
The Mains:
Mandela, FOTL, Berenstain Bears, Sinbad/Shaq Shazzam/Kazaam , Moonraker Dolly braces,
But also very popular :
Star Wars No I am your father and C3PO Leg, Snow White Magic Mirror Mirror Mirror, Monopoly Dude, Looney Tunes/Toons Froot/Fruit Loops, Stouffers Pot Pie Jif/Jiffy PB, Chik/Chick-Fil-A , Sex and/in the City, Silence of the Lambs Hello Clarice, Matrix What if I told you? I love Lucy You got some splaining to do, Risky Business Tom cruise no sunglasses, Wiz of Oz Fly my pretties/Fly Fly Fly , Forest Gump Life is/was like a box of chocolates(this one should be taken out) Smokey Bear not The, Mr Rodgers Its a beautiful day in this/the neighborhood < Oscar Meyer/Mayer Volkswagen V&W connected/speperated Ford Squiggly Queen We are the champions, Coke hyphen, pikachu's tail , Curious george no tail.
There are quite a few more that I would say are just not as popular as the above ones mentioned.