What is the Mandela effect?
The Mandela effect is the phenomenon of many people remembering something the same way, differently from the actual facts. It is named after Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement who later became president. Mandela was released in 1990 and died in 2013, but quite a few people remembered “seeing the news that he died in prison in the 1980s.”
Noticing this, the American writer Fiona Broome collected similar experiences on a website around 2010 and named it the “Mandela effect.”
Examples of the Mandela effect
Commonly cited examples include many people believing the man on the board game Monopoly wears a monocle (he does not) and many believing the tip of Pikachu’s tail is black (it is not). Familiar logos and famous movie lines also often spark online discussion of “that’s not how I remember it.”
The parallel world theory
Online, the Mandela effect is sometimes linked with theories such as “it is proof that I moved here from another world line (parallel world)” or “someone rewrote the past.” It is enjoyed together with strange stories about parallel worlds, such as the Shimokitazawa time slip.
How psychology explains it
In psychology, human memory is thought to be not an accurate recording but something rebuilt each time we recall it. Similar images of characters mix together, and assumptions of “it must have been like this” fill in memories, causing many people to share the same false memory. In 2022, American researchers published a paper confirming by experiment that many people make the same mistakes about logos and characters.
