Mandela Effect

The Mandela effect is the phenomenon in which a large number of people share a vivid, confident memory of an event that never happened, named after a false collective memory that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s rather than in 2013. The term was coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome after she found many others reported the same false memory. Psychologists explain the effect through ordinary memory processes rather than alternate realities, including source misattribution, where a memory of a similar real event, such as the death in custody of fellow anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, becomes confused with an unrelated public figure, along with social reinforcement as people share and validate each others mistaken recollections.