Improving Accuracy in Memory Recall: The Particular Case of Alibi Generation

Imagine you are standing trial for a crime you didn’t commit. The prosecutor asks, “Where were you at 9pm on the night of the murder?” The night feels like ages ago, and you aren’t entirely sure. Giving your best guess, you guess wrong.

In 1985, Ronald Cotton had to provide an alibi for the night of a crime. However, being confused, he provided the place he was the week before the crime. This memory error was largely to blame for Cotton’s sentence of life plus 50 years in prison. It wasn’t until ten years later that Cotton was exonerated based on DNA evidence.

What made Cotton confused about where he was? Was it just an unlucky day, or is this a mistake that people can commonly make? And would there be a way to fix these errors, or at least help people make fewer mistakes?

Unfortunately, until recently, not many scientific studies have directly examined this important problem. This was mainly because it was hard to establish the ground truth when asking where people were. However, now, almost everybody carries a tracking device that allows researchers to know precisely where they were at any given time: a smartphone.

Relying on this modern convenience, my colleagues and I designed a study where participants used a smartphone app to record their daily whereabouts. The app automatically and continuously recorded (every 10 minutes) the participant’s location and also their environment (such as the sound and their movements). This recording happened for 4 weeks.

A week after the recording period, participants were tested on the accuracy of their memory. We gave the participants a Google Map with 4 location pins, and asked which pin showed where they were at a certain day and time. One pin was the actual location, while the other pins were randomly selected from places they visited during the 4-week period. Each participant received 72 test questions, which asked a location for a different day and time.

Overall, people were accurate 64% of the time, which was above the accuracy level if they randomly guessed (25%, four options). However, the interesting part was in the errors that the participants made, as they showed certain patterns.

How Did People Mis-Remember?

We saw three common mistakes. When the participants picked a wrong location pin, it tended to be geographically closer to the correct pin. They also wrongly picked location pins that had a similar environment (such as sound, movement) to the correct pin. Lastly, the wrongly picked locations were visited at a similar time to the correct location.

This last type of memory error regarding time is especially interesting, as it was shown in two ways. First, participants wrongly picked locations that they visited right before or after visiting the correct location. For example, if the correct location was the grocery store, when people made an error, it tended to be the location before or after visiting the grocery store (maybe a  coffee shop).

Second, participants wrongly picked locations that they visited on the same day of week, or at the same time of day as the correct locations. For example, when making an error, some participants wrongly chose a location that they visited on the same day of the week as the correct location (e.g., Monday), even though it was a week before. Others chose a location that was visited at the same time as the correct location (e.g., 5pm), even though it was not on the same day. These examples illustrate a type of error regarding the so-called ‘categorical time’ —and this error is exactly the one Cotton made. Our study supports that this is a common error everyone makes!  These results together show that people are most confused when trying to remember events that happened in a similar location, time, and/or environment.

Is There A Way To Avoid These Memory Errors?

Avoiding these memory errors is essential when the outcome has a critical consequence. Is there a way to decrease, if not perfectly avoid, cases like Ronald Cotton’s?

The results of our study provide some hints.

First, investigators such as police interrogators should be fully aware of these natural memory errors that people make. Second, it will also help if questioners check for possible memory errors by asking specific questions. For example, if the person said he was at the bar last Monday at 5pm, the investigator can ask whether it was not the week before last, or whether it was not Tuesday or Friday at 5pm, to find out whether he has a pattern of visiting that bar that could confuse his memory. We believe that these ‘right questions’ can help people with more accurate recall, and—in the case of crimes—produce more accurate alibis.

Faulty memory isn’t always a huge deal, but as the case of Ronald Cotton shows, it can be the difference between freedom and imprisonment.


For Further Reading

Dennis, S. J., Garrett, P., Yim, H., Hamm, J., Osth, A. F., Sreekumar, V., & Stone, B. (2019). Privacy versus open science. Behavior Research Methods, 51, 1839–1848. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01259-5

Laliberte, E., Yim, H., Stone, B., & Dennis, S. J. (2021). The fallacy of an airtight alibi: Understanding human memory for “where” using experience sampling. Psychological Science, 32(6), 944–951. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620980752
 

Hyungwook Yim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. His research focuses on human learning and memory, and their development using computational models. 

Simon Dennis is a Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences, and the Director of the Complex Human Data Hub at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also the CEO of Unforgettable Research Services Pty Ltd. His research utilizes large scale real world data, experimental paradigms and computational modelling techniques to investigate the cognitive architecture underlying memory and language. 

 

The Unexpected Joy of Memories

Have you ever found an old shoe box and spent hours poring over old letters, ticket stubs, photographs, and memories of the good old days?

Around the world, people have recorded and shared memories for centuries, ranging from Hindu funeral customs to modern Instagram timelines. But are we doing this only to build a rear-view mirror for our future selves? Or does recording and revisiting memories offer any benefits in the present as well?

We conducted three studies using “memory jars”—virtual and physical glass jars filled with memories, moments, and experiences—to find out.

Writing And Reading Memories Makes Us Happy

We first investigated the benefits of recording and revisiting memories using notecards stored in physical glass jars.

Students looking back on college years

College is a special time for many people—moving away from home for the first time, making friends at spontaneous parties, stressing about internships, and discovering who you are.

In our first study, 120 college seniors each filled individual glass jars with their 7 favorite college memories. One month later, they either read their own memories, or the memories of another classmate from the study. We found that both writing and reading memories, regardless of whether they were their own memories or a classmate’s, made the students happier. This was true even when the students classified their own and others’ memories as sad—there was a happiness boost from reading and writing all kinds of memories, not just the happy or “good” memories.   

Senior citizens looking back on life

A few weeks after our first study, one of us heard amazing memories from some senior citizens with Alzheimer’s. A man who reported having only 32 memories left—the faces of 32 people he’d killed when he fought for Nazi Germany in World War II. A woman who juggled three husbands in the 1940s, all at the same time. A 105-year-old woman who had been sold as a slave in Alabama. The list went on, and drew us in. We wondered if older individuals would benefit from revisiting memories, much like the college students did.

We replicated our college student study with 105 senior citizens living in 11 different nursing homes across New Jersey. The photo below shows some of them sitting around the table with their memory jars and slips of paper. We found that both writing and reading memories made them feel happier. And less lonely!

image of group of senior citizens writing down memories for their memory jars

Something as simple as opening a memory jar—even if it was someone else’s—brought bursts of joy and feelings of social connection, at a time in life when loneliness may unfortunately be too common.

Digitally Recorded Memories Have Benefits Too

Given our increasingly digital world, where social media platforms with infinite feeds have replaced photo albums with finite pages, we wanted to investigate if the benefits of reading and writing memories remained when done digitally.

In our third study, we recruited 230 individuals online. They typed seven memories and put them in a “digital memory jar” on their cell phone, laptop, or tablet. One week later, they either read their own memories, or those of someone else in the study. As in our previous two studies, we found that people were happier, less lonely, and better off in psychological well-being after reading and writing memories – regardless of who the memories belonged to.  

We Underappreciate The Power Of Memories

Memories seemed to make people feel happy, connected, and well-off. But can people predict how happy reading their memories could make them?

Previous research has shown that people do not accurately predict how they will feel about events like breakups and career difficulties. We found that people aren’t great at predicting how they will feel about revisiting memory jars either. College students, senior citizens, and a diverse sample of people online were all much happier to read their own—and others’—memories than they predicted they would be.

We wondered if this could be because people thought their memories were too “mundane” and humdrum to enjoy later? Maybe they assumed that only looking back on incredible memories—like climbing Mount Everest or meeting Mother Teresa—would make them happy?

Indeed, this mistaken assumption explained people’s underestimation of how happy reading memories would make them—it’s not that people’s memories were more exciting than they realized, it’s that reading even unexciting memories made them happier than they expected. This could explain why people would rather not document everyday moments in the present, not realizing they would love to read those same everyday memories in the future.

Why Does This Matter?

Documenting and revisiting memories matters, because they are potentially a:

  1. Low-effort source of joy: Even spending five minutes writing and reading memories makes people feel happy, less lonely, and improves psychological well-being. This is particularly useful in current times of social isolation due to COVID-19.
     
  2. More thoughtful “social media”: Research shows that heavy social media use makes people unhappy and lonely. However, we found that creating and revisiting digital memory jars were good for happiness, loneliness, and well-being. Maybe these digital memory jars could be a way to avoid “memory spam” and could help people focus on the memories that matter, rather than keeping up with clickbait and heavily manicured profiles of strangers?         

Our memories have always shaped our sense of identity, future thoughts, and actions. By documenting these memories intentionally, maybe we can gain feelings of joy and social connection in the present as well. 


For Further Reading 

Sekhsaria, S., & Pronin, E. (2021). Underappreciated benefits of reading own and others' memories. Social Cognition39(4), 504-525. doi: 10.1521/soco.2021.39.4.504

Zhang, T., Kim, T., Brooks, A., Gino, F., & Norton, M. (2014). A “present” for the future: The unexpected value of rediscovery. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1851-1860. doi: 10.1177/0956797614542274
 

Shriya Sekhsaria is a Princeton alumna and CEO of Lumhaa, which helps people save and share memories with their families and favorite groups. Most of her work is focused on making technology more thoughtful and accessible.  

Emily Pronin is Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Much of her work concerns how people perceive themselves and others, and how errors in those perceptions can give rise to misunderstandings and conflict.

Exaggerated Memories of Anger in the Wake of Political Events

Societies are becoming increasingly polarized as people stockpile memories of political victories and grievances. What’s worse, these memories are not always accurate. Conflicting accounts, fake news, and conspiracy theories sow confusion about even the most basic facts concerning political events.

People’s memories of how political events made them feel are also easily distorted. Misremembering events and feelings can inflame political debate, driving individuals and groups further apart. This led my colleagues and me to ask whether people with detailed and accurate memories of the facts about political events are also better at remembering how those events made them feel.

To find out, we tested people’s memories of the facts and their feelings concerning two highly-emotional political events—Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2018 referendum vote in Ireland in favor of repealing a law that effectively banned abortion except in cases of substantial risk to the life of the mother. Just days after each event, we asked people to rate how angry, scared, and happy they were feeling. Six months later, we asked them (1) to rate how they were currently feeling about the events, (2) to recall their past feelings, and (3) to recall factual information about the events.

For example, 571 U.S. community members and undergraduates were asked to remember facts such as how Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, and on which congressman’s laptop did James Comey find emails pertinent to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use. Over 700 Irish community members and undergraduates were asked to remember facts such as what percentage of the country voted to repeal the country’s restrictive constitutional amendment on abortion. 

We also included a unique group of participants in our study of the 2016 election: people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). People with HSAM are often referred to in the media as “the people who never forget.” They remember personal and public events—even those that happened decades ago—with extraordinary accuracy, vividness, and detail.

This rare ability was first studied in detail by Professor James McGaugh and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine. Fewer than 100 people with HSAM have been identified worldwide based on extensive testing of the accuracy of verifiable autobiographical and public memories. Our study included 33 of these individuals who had been pretested and shown to have HSAM. This gave us an additional, novel way to find out if people with a firm grasp on the facts about political events are also more accurate at remembering how those events made them feel.

What did we find? Despite the different political events, countries, and historical backgrounds, the results of our two studies were strikingly similar. Overall, people were pretty good at remembering how they felt.

Nevertheless, when we looked at the difference between people’s initial and remembered emotions, we found some consistent memory biases. People exaggerated when remembering how angry they had felt about the political events but underestimated their feelings of happiness and fear. These biases effectively stripped nuance from their memories of their past emotional experience. People with more accurate memories of the facts concerning political events were just as susceptible to these biases in remembering their feelings.

Even People With Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory

Not surprisingly, people with HSAM remembered facts about the 2016 election significantly better than other participants. But when it came to remembering how Trump’s victory made them feel, they were just as prone to memory bias as other participants! So, greater accuracy in remembering events did not make people better at remembering emotions, either for the main group of participants or for those with an extraordinary ability to recall autobiographical events.

We also found that accuracy in remembering facts versus feelings stems from different sources. People who followed media reports more closely, and those who talked more with others about political events, had better memory for facts. The repetition of details in media reports and conversations—as long as the details provided are correct—helps people retain accurate factual memories.

But to remember how they felt, people can only rely on their own experience. We saw evidence of this when people remembered how they felt about Trump’s victory or about the repeal of Ireland’s highly restrictive law on abortion. We compared people’s current feelings and views about these events days, versus six months, after they happened. The more consistent people’s feelings and views stayed over time, the more accurately they remembered how they had initially felt. The more their feelings and views changed over time, the less accurately they remembered their feelings. So, people tend to misremember how they truly felt about events in the past if they have competing feelings and beliefs about those events in the present.

Memory Reconstruction

Memory reconstruction—updating our memories of the past to reflect our current feelings and beliefs—serves important functions. It lets us correct past misunderstandings and retain what we learn.

But amidst increasing political polarization, misremembering emotion can be harmful. Norms of tolerance and moderation are eroding in many societies worldwide. People’s tendency to exaggerate their past feelings of anger is worrisome because research shows that anger leads people to downplay risks, overlook commonalities between groups, and seek out confrontation. This makes the current political context even more toxic. In short, misremembering emotion can both stem from and stoke animosity, contributing to a destructive cycle of political polarization.


For Further Reading

Levine, L.J., Murphy, G., Lench, H.C., Greene, C.M., Loftus, E.F., Tinti, C., Schmidt, S., Muzzulini, B., Grady, R.H., Stark, S.M., & Stark, C.E. (2021). Remembering facts versus feelings in the wake of political events. Cognition and Emotion, 35(5), 936-955. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2021.1910496

LePort, A. K., Mattfeld, A. T., Dickinson-Anson, H., Fallon, J. H., Stark, C. E., Kruggel, F., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (2012). Behavioral and neuroanatomical investigation of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 98(1), 78-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2012.05.002

Levine, L. J. (1997). Reconstructing memory for emotions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126(2), 165-177. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.126.2.165

 

Linda J. Levine is a Professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine. She studies how people’s emotions affect their memories, how anticipating future emotion guides people’s decisions, and the ways people regulate emotion.

 

Surviving Your Loss by Looking to Your Past


For so many individuals and families across the globe who have lost loved ones to the COVID-19 pandemic, this has been a time steeped in tragedy and pain. During this time, many of us have lost loved ones due to other tragedies, as well. Our family suffered the loss of Stephen’s mother to cancer.

We know too well that nothing can replace the presence of loved ones in our lives or entirely relieve the pain of their loss. Nevertheless, we personally find some comfort in reflecting on the life of Stephen’s mother, our memories with her, and the positive impact she had on us. Research we conducted along with our collaborators, published just months before our loss, suggests that those of us who engage in this sort of nostalgic reverie may benefit from reductions in some of the negative symptoms that tend to accompany our loss and grief.

Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for treasured moments in our pasts, and the moments for which we are nostalgic tend to be ones that involve ourselves in relation to our close others, particularly at momentous occasions. We might reflect back on our wedding days, holiday gatherings with our families, great vacations—whatever moments are valuable to us personally.

Nostalgia is a Good Thing

Historically, scholars incorrectly viewed nostalgia as a disorder that would harm our health and well-being. Engaging in nostalgic reverie would make us feel sad and lonely and cause alarming physical symptoms, they thought.

However, historical scholars actually had it backwards: rather than nostalgia bringing about sadness and loneliness, uncomfortable states (like sadness and loneliness) tend to bring about nostalgia. Feeling lonely might lead us to reminisce about some of the treasured moments we shared with our loved ones, and reflecting on those moments then helps us feel less lonely. In this way, nostalgia serves a restorative function and can be quite healthy. In fact, people who experience nostalgia more frequently tend to experience psychological benefits including feeling more accepted, supported, inspired, and optimistic. They also tend to experience more positive emotion and feel that their lives are more meaningful.

Can nostalgia benefit a person even when facing the loss of a loved one to death? In our research, undergraduate students who had lost a loved one within the past two years reported their frequency and personal value of nostalgic engagement as well as their level of distress including intrusive thoughts, irritability and physical symptoms across a one-month period.

Nostalgia helped by reducing distress across time without encouraging what are called “escapist strategies” (like trying to avoid reminders of their loss). More nostalgic people reported fewer intrusive thoughts over time, but less nostalgic people did not experience a similar benefit.

We also examined irritability and physical reactions to the loss, such as trouble sleeping and a pounding heart, and found that these, too, declined over time among more nostalgic people who were suffering from more intense grief. People who were suffering from more intense grief who were less nostalgic did not experience a similar benefit. In fact, their symptoms worsened over time.

Nostalgia offers a more positive and constructive way of connecting with our pasts. Rather than ruminating on negative emotions and experiences, we may reflect on treasured, even triumphant moments, moments of love and joy.

We simply asked about nostalgia among our participants, but a great deal of research shows that a variety of methods—such as scents, narratives, and music—can induce nostalgia as well. For us, Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” will always remind us of Stephen dancing with his mother at our wedding. Paying attention to the present and looking toward the future are important, but it is also healthy to bring out those photo albums or play those records once in a while.


For Further Reading:

Reid, C. A., Green, J. D., Short, S. D., Willis, K. D., Moloney, J. M., Collison, E. A., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Gramling, S. (2020). The past as a resource for the bereaved: Nostalgia predicts declines in distress. Cognition and Emotion, 35(2), 256-268. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2020.1825339

Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., Arndt, J., Hepper, E. G., & Zhou, X. (2015). To nostalgize: Mixing memory with affect and desire. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 51, 189-273. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2014.10.001

Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 91(5), 975-993. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.975
 

Chelsea Reid is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston. She studies the self and interpersonal relationships, with focuses on nostalgia and attitude agreements between partners.

Stephen Short is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the College of Charleston with expertise in advanced statistical techniques and research interests in predictors of attitudes toward science.

 

I Don’t Need the Shopping List, Honey

At the heart of many controversies around gender equality lies the question of whether men and women have different talents or different abilities. Casual, everyday conversations but also pseudoscientific books are full of bold statements about how "men are better at X" or "only women can do Y," typically flanked by some kind of assertion along the lines of "researchers demonstrated this over and over again." But are such claims true?

While there is a fair amount of research on sex/gender differences in cognitive abilities, such bold statements often do not reflect the more complicated findings from research. A prominent example are the two abilities to memorize words and find words of a specified kind—for example, words that begin with a certain letter or belong to a certain category (such as "animals" or "things made of metal").

Textbooks, scientific articles, and popular science books have unanimously claimed that women excel at these two abilities. At closer look, however, those claims turned out to be less clear: For example, although there are plenty of studies demonstrating the female advantage, there are also several that do not report a sex/gender difference or even found a male advantage.

To finally "settle the score," my co-workers and I located all the studies on the topic we could find. This was a lot, because memory and finding words have been studied extensively. We were able to gather over 500 results from more than 350,000 participants, spanning more than 50 years.

The Female Advantage for Remembering Words is Real

The difference was very consistent, but not huge. Suppose you read a list of 16 words aloud to men and women and asked them to recall those words after a while. Typically, they manage about 10 to 12 words on average. The female advantage we found would roughly translate into a difference of one and a half words.

As for finding words, there was also a female advantage but only when men and women are asked to name as many words as possible that begin with a certain letter. The female advantage in both remembering words and finding words showed up in children as well as older adults and it changed very little over the last 50 years. If the word must belong to a certain category, however, the sex/gender difference was practically zero. This was probably because the male advantage in some categories (for example, "animals") and the female advantage in other categories (such as "fruits/food/vegetables") cancelled each other out.  

So, women are indeed better, but does a small difference matter? We specifically investigated tasks that are routinely used in neuropsychological assessments to examine, for example, whether somebody has dementia. Many of those assessments take sex/gender into account but not all. This could be costly: If a man is just below the cut-off score for dementia, it might not be dementia itself, but merely the disadvantage of being a man. Conversely, actual dementia diagnoses might be missed in women because they have a higher baseline performance, on average.

There are, of course, also abilities in which men consistently excel—for example, when imagining how a complex cube figure would look like when it is looked at from a different angle. Most cognitive abilities, however, show small or negligible sex/gender differences and one should always remember that these effects emerge on average. The best word memorizer might be a man, the best mental rotator of complex cube figures might be a woman.


For Further Reading

Asperholm, M., Hogman, N., Rafi, J., & Herlitz, A. (2019). What did you do yesterday? A meta-analysis of sex differences in episodic memory. Psychological Bulletin, 145(8), 785–821. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000197

Halpern, D. F. (2012). Sex differences in cognitive abilities (4th ed.). Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis Group.

Hirnstein, M., Stuebs, J., Moè, A., & Hausmann, M. (2023). Sex/gender differences in verbal fluency and verbal-episodic memory: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(1), 67-90. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221082116

Voyer, D., Saint Aubin, J., Altman, K., & Gallant, G. (2021). Sex differences in verbal working memory: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 352-398. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000320


Marco Hirnstein is a professor at the Department of Biological and Medical Psychology at the University of Bergen and is interested in how nature AND nurture give rise to sex/gender differences and similarities.

Selfies and Other Third-Person Photos Help Us Capture the Meaning of Moments

Imagine you are eating your dream meal and want to commemorate the moment: Should you snap a picture of the food by itself or take a selfie with your partner while you eat? New research suggests that people use first-person photography, taking a photo of the scene from one's own perspective, when they want to document a physical experience, but opt for third-person photos, depicting themselves in the scene (like selfies), to capture the deeper meaning of events.

Previous research has focused on how the photo-taker wants to present themselves to others. The current research, published today in Social Psychological and Personality Science, also considers people who are taking photos for themselves to look back on.

"Not only do we find that most people take both types of photos in different situations, but that people also differ across situations in whether their goal for taking a photo is to capture the physical experience of the moment or the bigger meaning of the moment in their life," says lead author Zachary Niese, of the University of Tübingen.

Across six studies involving over 2,100 participants, researchers found that people are more likely to take third-person photos when their goal is to capture meaning, and that people are reminded more of the meaning when looking at their own third-person photos, compared to first-person. Researchers also found that people tend to like their photos more when the perspective matches their goal for taking the photo.

"Taking and posting pictures is a part of everyday life for many people. While there is sometimes derision about photo-taking practices in popular culture, personal photos have the potential to help people reconnect to their past experiences and build their self-narratives," says Dr. Niese.

Dr. Niese warns against inferring that photos taken from one perspective are "better" than another. The research demonstrates that the most effective perspective depends on the person's goal in the moment – whether that be to capture a physical experience or the deeper meaning of an event.

As people become more mindful of their goals when taking pictures and the role of perspective, they can become more skilled at preserving memories that they can reflect on later.

"People's photo-taking practices have the potential to serve a more fundamental human motive to develop and understand our sense of self, both in terms of the experiences in our life as well as their bigger meaning," says Dr. Niese.

--

Press may request an embargoed copy at [email protected].

Study: Niese, Zachary Adolph; Libby, Lisa K.; Eibach, Richard P. Picturing Your Life: The Role of Imagery Perspective in Personal Photos. Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Narcissists Have Poor Memory for the World Around Them

Think about the last time you were in an online meeting or lecture. Let's imagine you had your web camera turned on and your image was visible on the right-hand side of the screen. How much time did you spend looking at yourself, and did that impair your ability to concentrate on the meeting information?

In our research, my colleagues and I considered the possibility that those who are high in narcissism (the tendency to be self-focused, egotistical, and care little about others) have worse memory for what they have seen and heard than those who are low in narcissism. If people focus more on themselves, they may spend less time attending to other information.

Narcissists in an Online Lecture

In our research, we found that individuals higher in narcissism were more likely to focus on themselves during an online lecture, which hurt their ability to remember information. Our method went like this: Participants were seated at a computer and were told that they would be watching an online lecture. The webcam was turned on such that participants could see themselves on the bottom right-hand side of the screen. After watching the lecture, we tested the participants' memory for the information. Later, we watched the webcam videos and timed how often participants looked at themselves in the webcam. We found that those with higher narcissism paid more attention to themselves in the webcam and, in turn, scored lower on the memory test. Thus, as long as their eyes are on the screen, it's a zero-sum situation: spending time attending to other information versus focusing on themselves.

Next, Social Information versus Objects

We further tested this idea by exploring whether those who are high in narcissism are worse at recalling social information such as faces, versus non-social information like houses and cars.

First, we explored how well individuals with high (versus low) narcissism could recognize previously seen faces. To do this, we measured people's narcissistic traits and then they completed a recognition memory test, including a learning and recognition phase. First, participants viewed 40 pictures of people's faces for 3 seconds each. Next, they saw another 80 photos of people's faces, half of which they saw previously, while the other half were new. Then, they guessed which faces they'd seen before. Although people are pretty good at recognizing faces, in general, we found that those who were more narcissistic were worse at being able to recognize others.

Next, we wanted to see whether this memory deficit extended to non-social stimuli, like household objects, houses, and cars. Using a similar memory task, we found that individuals high in narcissism had worse recognition memory for household objects, houses, and cars than individuals who were low in narcissism.

In sum, we found that individuals with high narcissism struggled to remember other people and also the world around them. This research highlights how our personality traits can impact the way we recognize, recall, and remember information.


For Further Reading

Giacomin, M., Brinton, C., & Rule, N. O. (2022). Narcissistic individuals exhibit poor recognition memory. Journal of Personality90(5), 675-689. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12690


Miranda Giacomin is an assistant professor at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She is a personality psychologist whose research focuses on "dark" personality traits and social perception.

Fake News Can Distort Your Memories

When you go to the polls on election day, you consider what you know about a candidate or an issue before you place your vote. But fake news may lead you to question the accuracy of what you know.  We know that voters can believe that a fake news story is true, but our recent research went one step further to study the effects of fake news on voters’ memories for completely fabricated events. 

In 2018, a referendum was held in Ireland to decide whether the constitutional ban on abortion would be repealed. The campaigns were highly emotional and, because there was a great deal of suspicion and accusations of fake news by both sides, voters were urged to be critical news consumers.

In the week preceding polling day, we showed over 3000 research participants some news stories related to the abortion referendum and asked about their memories for these events. Among the true news stories were some fake stories that we fabricated for the study. All participants saw a fake story concerning illegal campaign posters, but some participants saw a version that implicated the Yes (pro-choice) side and other participants saw a version that implicated the No (pro-life) side. The stories looked like this:

image of two signs with different messages

Figure 1: Fake news stories concerning illegal posters used in our study. These stories were entirely fabricated for the purpose of the study, and all participants saw either the Yes version (left) or the No version (right).

Our results showed that many participants reported remembering these fabricated events, with most of them citing a specific source where they had seen the story before, reporting that they had seen it on TV, in a newspaper, or on social media. Some participants even situated the event at a specific point in time.  For example, one participant said “I had my mind made up prior to these posters, however, after this story I was disinterested in the No campaign as I didn’t agree with the involvement of other countries in our country’s decisions.” Other participants even added new details such as specifying how the posters were destroyed. One said “I don’t think anything wrong happened and the posters shouldn’t have been burned.” These findings show that rich false memories can form from a simple piece of misinformation.

As you read about this research, you may think that you wouldn’t be susceptible to such a fake news story. This is a common response, so we wondered whether certain people or certain stories are particularly likely to create false memories. Although Yes and No voters did not differ in their overall susceptibility to fake news, we found that participants were more likely to report a false memory when the content of the fake story agreed with their own beliefs. This was true for both the Yes and No sides and is in line with studies showing that information that is consistent with our beliefs tends to feel true, even when it’s not. In addition, the tendency to create false memories for offenses perpetrated by the other side was particularly strong for participants who scored lower on a short IQ test.

Finally, we wondered whether warning participants about fake news would eliminate these effects. So, in another study, we told participants that they may have been exposed to fake news and then asked them to reconsider the stories they had seen and select any that were fake. Even when warned, 70% of those who had reported a false memory failed to retract it and continued to report confidence in their memory. Moreover, participants were less than half as likely to identify a story as fake if the story was in line with their beliefs, and this effect was stronger for those with lower cognitive ability.

Our memories directly impact our behaviour, so the next question is whether this kind of false memory can change how someone intends to vote. This question is difficult to test ethically in a real election or referendum, but there is strong evidence that false memories can affect behavior in other real-life situations.  For example, a number of studies have found that, after forming a false memory for getting sick from eating a particular food, participants were less likely to consume that food in future, and these effects sometimes persisted for months.

For now, we can conclude that fake news can lead voters to form false memories.  People may be especially likely to form false memories that are in line with their political beliefs, and warning them about fake news does little to reduce its impact on their false memories. These findings suggest that we should all be particularly wary of news articles that align with our existing attitudes, both because we are more likely to form a false memory for those events, and because it is more difficult to correct this false memory later. When we encounter news stories that we strongly agree with, we should consider whether they are simply too good to be true.


For Further Reading

Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & memory12(4), 361-366.

Murphy, G., Loftus, E. F., Grady, R. H., Levine, L. J., & Greene, C. M. (2019). False Memories for Fake News During Ireland’s Abortion Referendum. Psychological science30(10), 1449-1459. (available here)

 

Gillian Murphy is a lecturer at University College Cork, Ireland.