A Cornell University study examines the relationship between what we believe about people and our memory of events involving them.

To conduct the study, David Pizarro, assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, and three colleagues

gave 283 college students a story about a man who walked out on a restaurant bill, including what the man ate and drank and the amount of his bill. Half the participants read that the man walked out on the bill because he “was a jerk who liked to steal,” and half read that the man left without paying because he received an emergency phone call.

“One week later the people who were told he was a jerk remembered a higher bill — from 10 to 25 percent more than the bill actually was. Those who were told he had an emergency phone call remembered a slightly lower-than-actual bill,” said Pizarro.

The researchers appear focused on how these distortions may affect civic institutions (e.g. eyewitness testimony during criminal trials); they also characterize the distortions as stemming from observers’ ethical judgments. In Pizarro’s words: “[O]ur study shows that morally blaming a person can distort memory for the severity of his or her crime or misbehavior.”

But it seems to me that something broader is at work, here. It’s not morals, but motivation. When we witness events involving other people, and string those events together as a narrative, the narrative is shaped by our understanding of the players’ motivations.

At some point, we also “shade in” or heighten certain details within our memory of events in order to capture or express our understanding of it more accurately (as opposed to cataloguing what actually happened).

Kinda like writing fiction ;-)

The full study will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Memory and Cognition.

(Incidentally, the Cornell article I’ve quoted here implies that every single person in the study misremembered the bill. Hmmmmm. I suppose that’s possible . . .)