Rewriting History: The Biasing Effects of Attitudes on Memory

Abstract

The present study examines whether people's memories for events are distorted to become more consistent with their attitudes and beliefs. It was hypothesized that this distortion might occur as a result of reconstructive memory processes at the time of retrieval. That is, when people are asked to remember an event, they may employ their attitudes and beliefs about a topic to reconstruct their memories of the relevant incident. In the process of reconstructing the incident, they may introduce new information and distort old information. Subjects, after responding to a questionnaire about their attitudes toward nuclear power, read a story describing a fire at a nuclear power plant. They were then given a recognition test over the material, either immediately or at 1- or 2-week delays. At the immediate test, there was no relationship between subjects' attitudes and their recognition performance. At both delays, however, subjects were more likely to recognize belief-consistent information; this was true both for actual material from the passage and for distortions and introductions to it. This suggests that reconstructive processes resulted in subjects' memories becoming the more belief-consistent as veridical memory decayed.