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.

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:ImpossibleMemories 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.…”

Immunity to error through misidentification in observer memories: A moderate separatist account

“…Recanati, 2007). There is empirical support for this first intuition as illustrated by the phenomena of “borrowed memories” (Brown et al., 2015) and “disputed memories” (Sheen et al., 2001), in which aspects of the memories of other people can be appropriated and incorporated into one's own memories. In some cases, one can become unsure whether a certain event happened to oneself or the other person (see section 5 below).…”