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Some Biases of Memory

This version was saved 16 years, 9 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by PBworks
on July 25, 2007 at 5:04:15 pm
 

"Memories are distorted in a self-enhancing direction in all sorts of ways. Men and women alike remember having had fewer sexual partners than they really did, they remember having far more sex with those partners than they actually had, and they remember using condoms more often than they actually did. People also remember voting in elections they didn't vote in, they remember voting for the winning candidate rather than the politician they did vote for, they remember giving more to charity than they really did, they remember that their children walked and talked at an earlier age than they really did... You get the idea."

 

Quote from Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2007) Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), page 79.

 

M. Garry, S. J. Sharman, J. Feldman, G. A. Marlatt, E. F. Loftus "Examining Memory for Heterosexual College Students' Sexual Experiences Using an Electronic Mail Diary" (Full Text PDF) Health Psychology 2002, Vol. 21, No. 6, 629–634

To examine memory for sexual experiences, the authors asked 37 sexually active, nonmonogamous, heterosexual college students to complete an e-mail diary every day for 1 month. The diary contained questions about their sexual behaviors. Six to 12 months later, they returned for a surprise memory test, which contained questions about their sexual experiences from the diary phase. They were asked about their sexual partners, the types of sexual experiences they had, and condom use. Participants underreported the number of partners they had, but they overreported both sexual experiences and condom use. The results have implications for both sexual health educators and for people who engage in high-risk sexual behaviors

 

"We wondered if participants realized how inaccurate they were. For each event, we compared participants' accuracy ratings with their actual accuracy and found that they were uncorrelated, suggesting that people had little awareness of how inaccurate they were."

"People also remember voting in elections they didn't vote in, they remember voting for the winning candidate rather than the politician they did vote for..."

Abelson, R. P., Loftus, E. F., & Greenwald, A. G. (1992) "Attempts to improve the accuracy of self-reports of voting" in  J. M. Tanur (ed.) 1992 Questions About Questions: Inquiries into the Cognitive Bases of Surveys.  New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

 

Haven't found an abstract for this yet, but it describes attempts to create surveys that corrected for these biases of memory, none of which worked.

Robert F. Belli, Michael W. Traugott, Margaret Young, Katherine A. McGonagle (1999) "Reducing Vote Overreporting in Surveys: Social Desirability, Memory Failure, and Source Monitoring" The Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 63: p90-108

 

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