Borrowing Personal Memories

Abstract

Summary: The present investigation documents memory borrowing in college-age students, defined as the telling of others' autobiographical stories as if they are one's own. In both pilot and online surveys, most undergraduates admit to borrowing personal stories from others or using details from others' experiences to embellish their own retellings. These behaviors appear primarily motivated by a desire to permanently incorporate others' experiences into one's own autobiographical record (appropriation), but other reasons include to temporarily create a more coherent or engaging conversational exchange (social connection), simplify conveying somebody else's interesting experience (convenience), or make oneself look good (status enhancement). A substantial percentage of respondents expressed uncertainty as to whether an autobiographical experience actually belonged to them or to someone else, and most respondents have confronted somebody over ownership of a particular story. Documenting memory borrowing is important as the behavior has potential consequences for the creation of false memories.

Hypnosis as performance autoethnography in qualitative sociological research

“…Furthermore there is general agreement that we modify and reconstruct our remembered past in order to create and maintain a smooth narrative of our past for social, cultural and personal reasons, as Fernández (2014) and Fivush and Merrill (2014) have discussed at length, often using false memories from peers and family members (Brown et al , 2015). Gleaves et al (2004).…”

Believing is seeing

“…Taken together, memory associations in an episodic memory network can be shaped and reconstructed by incorporating new information. This idea is in line with research showing that memory can be edited, that is, people sometimes "borrow" or recombine content from true memories to construct vivid false memories (Brown, Caderao, Fields, & Marsh, 2015;Lampinen, Meier, Arnal, & Leding, 2005;Lampinen, Ryals, & Smith, 2008). Belief may play an important role in reconstructing memory associations and it is much more flexible than recollection.…”

Setting the Records Straight: Impossible Memories and the Persistence of Their Phenomenological Qualities

“…Interestingly, some of the twin pairs only came to discover there was a recollection to dispute while participating in the study (Sheen et al, 2001, p. 786). As a recent survey suggests, twins are not the only individuals who report experiencing memory disputes (Brown, Caderao, Fields, & Marsh, 2015). For present purposes, however, there is an important difference to note between twins' disputes relative to other kinds of memory disputes discussed in the main text of this article.…”