The Mandela Effect

So what I wanted to figure out for Science Fair was, "Is the Mandela Effect Real?"

My board that I used

I put all the slides that I needed on my board in a black background and a white text because the board was white.

I also put pictures of new Mandela Effects that I didn't use for my test.

My data tables I used

This was my graph for the kids

This was my graph for Adults

The two graphs for the data that I had.

The Final Abstract

Have you ever been convinced something in particular to be definitely true only to find out your memory was completely wrong? This is coined, “The Mandela Effect.” This misremembering of common events began in 2010 when people believed Nelson Mandela was found dead in prison in the 1980’s to find out he was freed from prison in 1990 and passed away in 2013. Another example of the Mandela effect is seen in Snow White. People believe the evil queen says, “Mirror, Mirror, on the wall” but the evil queen actually says, “Magic mirror on the wall.” So I wanted to test if the Mandela effect could be seen on my friends, teachers, and family. My hypothesis is that people will get the questions on my test wrong misremembering common events seen through the slides shown. I also think the Mandela effect would affect more adults than children because as you get older your memory becomes worse.

I did the experiment by taking two age groups, adult and kids, and tested them on a test I created. The test included 5 popular examples of The Mandela Effect. The first phase of my experiment was making a paper with the questions from my slides that I recorded the data on from the subjects answers. Once I did that, I took 15 kids and 15 adults to do the test and record their data on the papers made. The test consisted of five pictures. I went through the five slides two times and afterwards asked what they saw on each slide and recorded my data. After I did the tests, I made two graphs, one for adults and one for kids. Then, I looked at all my data and saw how many questions each group got wrong. If the questions had more wrong than correct than I could conclude the Mandela effect is real.

The data I collected was interesting because the questions kept getting more difficult. The easiest question was the first and the hardest question that most people got wrong was the last one according to my data. Every person did a good job in total. The kids had 5 more question correct than the adults. The children’s total data for the 15 test subjects was 46 correct 29 incorrect. The adults had 5 more questions wrong than the children. The adult’s total data was 41 correct and 36 incorrect.

The end result is that my hypothesis was incorrect because there was more correct answers overall than incorrect. My hypothesis that the Mandela effect would affect more adults than children was correct because the adults had 34 incorrect answers and 41 correct while the kids had 29 incorrect and 46 correct which is a 5 answer differential between both age groups.

In order to improve my experiment I could have done a larger sample size and done more common questions for the slides shown. I could've asked about the evil queen seen in Snow White or how many rings are used in Target’s logo, but I have to say this experiment was really fun and interesting for me.