magazine issue 7 2016 / Issue 31

Was that how it happened? Shaping our memory for personal experiences in conversation with others

• written by Joanne Rechdan, Melanie Sauerland, Lorraine Hope & James Ost
• edited by Emir Efendic

Why might the audience of a retelling exert such an effect? According to the principle of co-construction, recollections of memories in conversation are the product of both the speaker and their social environment (Pasupathi, 2001). Attentive and engaged listeners tend to elicit more detailed accounts from speakers, facilitating speaker’s long-term memory for an event (Pasupathi, Stallworth, & Murdoch, 1998). Moreover, speakers alter (or ‘tune’) their retellings of experienced events to suit a particular audience, and these alterations can affect their underlying memory for an event. Higgins and Rholes (1978), for example, had participants read a description of a stimulus person that contained negative, positive, or ambiguous evaluations. Participants then wrote a message describing the person to a receiver whom they were told either liked or disliked the person. Results showed that participants wrote a more negative description when they were told that the receiver disliked the person, and a more positive description when they were told that the receiver liked the person. Additionally, participants’ later recall of the original description of the stimulus person included distortions that were congruent with the message they had written for the receiver.  Thus, participants altered the descriptions in their message to match the receiver’s opinion, and these alterations influenced their later recall; the researchers termed this the saying-is-believing effect, but it has been referred to elsewhere as audience tuning (Hellmann, Echterhoff, Kopietz, Niemeier, & Memon, 2011).In sum,once a memory has been altered through conversation, subsequent retellings are more likely to reflect the most recent retelling, rather than the original memory. This may result from the restructuring of schemas that guide future retellings, as well as selective rehearsal of information (Marsh & Tversky, 2000).

The effects of repeated retellings on subsequent recall: Williams told stories about his experience many times

Having told his story to many different people on many occasions, Williams’ account is likely to have been gradually edited and altered.As noted earlier, speakers edit the details they discuss to serve their objectives, and the interests and assumed prior knowledge of the listener. Thus, people normally recall more about an event than they recount (Pasupathi, 2001).A major finding with respect to the selective reporting of memories in conversation is that details that go unreported, and therefore unrehearsed, may be left out of future retellings of the same memory. This phenomenon, termed retrieval induced forgetting, is thought to occur because selective retellings strengthen memories for mentioned details, while allowing memory traces of unmentioned details to weaken and decay (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994).

Brian Williams gave several documented accounts of his ordeal over the skies in Iraq. He probably gave several more undocumented, and informal accounts—discussions with friends, family and peers—of his experience. When telling his story, Williams likely capitalized on the parts that elicited the most interest from his audience, omitting the more mundane details. Each of his retellings had the potential to alter his memory for the event, slowly forming the account he eventually related to Letterman. In fact, the gradual change in his story is reflected in a blog post he wrote in 2008. In the post, which was intended as a tribute to a war veteran, Williams wrote that the helicopter flying ahead of his was attacked from the ground, and the four helicopters in pursuit took fire. Five years later, Williams escalated from being in a helicopter that ‘took fire’ to being in the actual helicopter that was hit.