Since the public’s view is that our memories are accurate and unchanging over time, it is perhaps no surprise that most people agree that having a good memory is highly desirable.
Is Forgetting Always Undesirable?
Is it true, however, that forgetting things is highly undesirable? It is clearly true sometimes. You have probably had the chastening experience of introducing people to each other when you realize with a sinking feeling that you have forgotten someone’s name.
Another distressing experience is to have arranged to meet up with a friend but you then forget all about it.
Ironically, his memory powers so strong that they were very disruptive. For example, when hearing a prose passage, he complained, ‘Each word calls up images, they collide with one another, and the result is chaos’.
The adverse effects of his incredible memory precluded him from leading a normal life and he finished up in an asylum.
More evidence that an absence of forgetting can be disadvantageous comes from the study of individuals who can apparently recall almost everything they have ever experienced in vivid detail, a condition known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) Opens in new window.
This condition may seem desirable if you are one of those individuals who sometimes finds it hard to recall clearly important events from your own life.
However, consider the case of Jill Price Opens in new window, an American woman, who is one of the best-known individuals with HSAM.
She regards her phenomenal autobiographical memory as a problem:
I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!! Parker et al., 2006.
Surprisingly, Jill Price (and most other individuals with HSAM) exhibit only average performance on standard laboratory memory tasks.
The explanation of her HSAM is that she has many symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and spends much of her time needlessly recalling events from her own life.
Santangelo et al. (2018) reviewed research on individuals with HSAM, and reporter that the majority of them have similar obsessional characteristics to those of Jill Price.
Forgetting Can Serve Several Useful Functions
The findings from S. and from individuals with HSAM support William James’s (1890, p. 680) contention that
if we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.William James (1890, p. 680)
The implication is that forgetting can serve several useful functions. Norby (2015) identified three such functions:
It can enhance an individual’s psychological well-being by making them less able to retrieve painful memories from their past.
It can be very useful to forget outdated information so that it cannot interfere with current information. For example, remembering your current telephone number would be a serious challenge if all of your previous telephone numbers, and those of all of your friends, remained equally strong and retrievable memories.
When trying to remember information you have read or heard, it is usually optimal to forget the specific details and recall only the overall gist or message. If we focus on the details, our ability to think clearly will be impaired in the same way as S Opens in new window.
In most laboratory-based research, people are typically encouraged to do their best to remember all the information that has been presented to them. In other words, the goal is to maximize their memory.
In the real world, however, that is mostly not our goal. Instead, we use memory as a means to achieve other goals (e.g. feeling happy; having a successful career) rather than as an end in itself.
Intriguingly, much laboratory research on memory has probably contributed to the belief that forgetting Opens in new window is undesirable. In such research, the participants are generally given the goal of producing accurate recollection. In everyday life, in contrast, our social or communicative goals often conflict with the goal of accurate memory.
Suppose you are describing your experiences at an event to a friend. Brown et al. (2015) found that 58% of students admitted to having ‘borrowed’ other people’s memories while describing their experiences to another person. This often occurred because students had the goal of entertaining or impressing their audience.
If your description of an event in your life is deliberately distorted, does this produce forgetting of the original memory?
Evidence that it can was reported by Dudokovic et al. (2004), who asked some people to recall a story as accurately as possible whereas others were instructed to recall the same story entertainingly.
Entertaining recalls were more emotional but contained fewer details than accurate recalls. Subsequently, all the participants were instructed to recall the story accurately.
Those who had previously provided entertaining recalls fewer details and were less accurate than those who had previously been instructed to recall the story accurately.
These findings illustrate the ‘saying-is-believing’ effect: tailoring what one says about an event to suit a given audience causes partial forgetting of that event.
How can we explain the saying-is-believing effect?
Echterhoff and Higgins (2018) argued that humans are very social beings who prioritize the goal of constructing an agreed shared reality with others. This shared reality strengthens our social relationships.
Echterhoff and Higgins concluded that the saying-is-believing effect occurs to the extent that communicators have the goal of creating a shared reality with their audience, thereby making it a ‘sharing-is-believing’ effect (pp. iv–v).
Thus, forgetting often occurs because we attach more importance to the goal of belonging than the goal of accurate remembering.
Memory and Decision Making
As William James pointed out,
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.William James (1890)
Richards and Frankland (2017) proposed an approach supporting that viewpoint and exemplifying some of the ideas discussed above.
More specifically, they argued that ‘the goal of memory is not the transmission of information through time, per se. Rather, the goal of memory is to optimize decision making. As such, transcience [forgetting] is as important as persistence [remembering]’ (p. 1071).
When does forgetting enhance decision making?
According to Richards and Frankland (2017), effective decision making requires that we are not bombarded with multiple conflicting memories. However, this would be very likely in the absence of forgetting because we live in a world that changes rapidly and is ‘noisy’ (is highly variable).
When the world changes rapidly, it is useful to forget information that is now outdated and misleading so that we can cope effectively with the changed environment.
When the environment is noisy, we would often make very poor decisions if we focused excessively on detailed memories for any given relatively rare occurrence.
We are far more likely to produce effective decision making if we extract the gist from any occurrences so that we focus on what is true on average rather than exceptional specific events.
