A robust preference for cheap-and-easy strategies over reliable strategies when verifying personal memories

Nash, Robert A.; Wade, Kimberley A.; Garry, Maryanne; Adelman, James S.

doi:10.1080/09658211.2016.1214280

Cited by 14 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Findings concerning the reasons for relinquishing belief and verification strategies broadly fit within the source monitoring framework (Nash, Wade, Garry, & Adelman, 2017).…”

Section: Nonbelieved Memories 28mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Theoretically, research on the reasons for reducing belief in occurrence parallels strategies that people use to verify memories that have been brought into question (Nash, Wade, Garry, & Adelman, 2017; Wade & Garry, 2005; Wade, Nash, & Garry, 2014). These studies indicate that people evaluate the costs and reliability when choosing how to verify personal memories and tend to prioritize lower cost (in terms of the effort required to pursue a memory verification strategy) over reliability when picking a strategy.…”

Section: Reasons To Reduce Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Nonbelieved memories in the false memory archive.

Otgaar¹,

Bücken²,

Bogaard³

et al. 2019

Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition

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“…Findings concerning the reasons for relinquishing belief and verification strategies broadly fit within the source monitoring framework (Nash, Wade, Garry, & Adelman, 2017).…”

Section: Nonbelieved Memories 28mentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Reasons To Reduce Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonbelieved memories in the false memory archive.

Otgaar¹,

Bücken²,

Bogaard³

et al. 2019

Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These faulty recollections can be particularly easy to mistake for real experiences, because their components all really happened—just not together as a single event. What compounds the problem is that people prefer to engage in easy strategies rather than the more difficult, yet more reliable, ones that encourage better source monitoring (Nash et al, 2017). Worse still, even in high-stakes medical situations, people have difficulty assessing the accuracy of their own memories for life-or-death actions (Sharman et al, 2008).…”

Section: The Parallel Challenges For Contact Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contact Tracing: A Memory Task With Consequences for Public Health

Garry

Hope

Zajac

et al. 2020

Perspect Psychol Sci

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In the battle for control of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), we have few weapons. Yet contact tracing is among the most powerful. Contact tracing is the process by which public-health officials identify people, or contacts, who have been exposed to a person infected with a pathogen or another hazard. For all its power, though, contact tracing yields a variable level of success. One reason is that contact tracing’s ability to break the chain of transmission is only as effective as the proportion of contacts who are actually traced. In part, this proportion turns on the quality of the information that infected people provide, which makes human memory a crucial part of the efficacy of contact tracing. Yet the fallibilities of memory, and the challenges associated with gathering reliable information from memory, have been grossly underestimated by those charged with gathering it. We review the research on witnesses and investigative interviewing, identifying interrelated challenges that parallel those in contact tracing, as well as approaches for addressing those challenges.

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“…Indeed, although communicative goals undoubtedly can motivate source monitoring, these goals do not necessarily take precedence over other self-serving goals. When a skeptic challenges the authority of our memories, for example, we seem in fact to systematically prefer cheap-and-easy strategies, not reliable strategies, for verifying the truth (Nash et al 2017;Wade et al 2014).…”

Section: Jennifer Nagelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memory

Mahr¹,

Csibra²

2017

Behav Brain Sci

220

152

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Short Abstract-We propose a novel account of episodic memory function based on a conceptual and empirical analysis of its role in belief formation. We provide a critique of the view that episodic memory serves future-directed imagination, and argue that the central features of this capacity can instead be explained by the role it plays in human communication. On this view, episodic memory allows us to communicatively support our interpretations of the past by gauging when we can assert epistemic authority. This capacity is ineliminable in justification of, and negotiations about, social commitments established by past interactions.Long Abstract-Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential, 'autonoetic' character. Here, we offer a comprehensive characterization of episodic memory in representational terms, and propose a novel functional account on this basis. We argue that episodic memory should be understood as a distinctive epistemic attitude taken towards an event simulation. On this view, episodic memory has a metarepresentational format and should not be equated with beliefs about the past. Instead, empirical findings suggest that the contents of human episodic memory are often constructed in the service of the explicit justification of such beliefs. Existing accounts of episodic memory function that have focused on explaining its constructive character through its role in 'future-oriented mental time travel' neither do justice to its capacity to ground veridical beliefs about the past nor to its representational format. We provide an account of the metarepresentational structure of episodic memory in terms of its role in communicative interaction. The generative nature of recollection allows us to represent and communicate the reasons for why we hold certain beliefs about the past. In this process, autonoesis corresponds to the capacity to determine when and how to assert epistemic authority in making claims about the past. A domain where such claims are indispensable are human social engagements. Such engagements commonly require the justification of entitlements and obligations, which is often possible only by explicit reference to specific past events.

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A robust preference for cheap-and-easy strategies over reliable strategies when verifying personal memories

Cited by 14 publications

References 32 publications

Nonbelieved memories in the false memory archive.

Nonbelieved memories in the false memory archive.

Contact Tracing: A Memory Task With Consequences for Public Health

Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memory

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