Norm-induced forgetting: when social norms induce us to forget

ABSTRACT

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap.

KEYWORDS:

• Forgetting
• retrieval failure
• social norms
• gender norms
• memory traces
• memory cues

Acknowledgements

I thank Evan Westra, Samia Hesni, Sarah Robins, Ana Carolina Gomez Sierra, Elise Frketich, the audience of the 49th Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, and the audience of the Workshop ‘Experiences of Loss: An Interdisciplinary Exploration’ at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I am extremely grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and objections.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Considering the cases I want to explain, in this manuscript the relevant level of analysis for norms psychology are not entire cultures or societies but individuals who have internalized certain social norms. There are many accounts of norms psychology: in this paper I rely on some key ideas shared by these accounts.

2. I thank two anonymous reviewers for pushing me to clarify this aspect.

3. One might worry that focusing only on semantic memory is artificial because an individual memory can contain both semantic and episodic features. In response to this worry, I want to note that, in forgetting, episodic and semantic features are often dissociable. For example, think about having a conversation with a friend, then episodically remembering aspects of that event, but not the content of the conversation. A similar thing holds for our case. It might be that our character episodically remembers some features of the learning event; still, he forgets a semantic content: a project idea. Hence, in my case it is apt to focus only on semantic features. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting clarifying this point.

4. I thank an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to consider this objection.

5. Another explanation appeals to proactive interference due to cue-overload (Underwood, 1957). According to this explanation, forgetting is caused by information learned before the forgotten memory was encoded, which disrupts the consolidation of memory traces through interference mechanisms. Since this explanation has been disconfirmed for cases of everyday forgetting (Wixted, 2010), I do not consider it here. However, I do not exclude that proactive interference may have an influence on forgetting at another stage: retrieval.

6. Internal affective states (e.g., moods) and aspects of the environment (e.g., evocative objects and odors) are powerful cues for recalling episodic memories but not semantic memories (Hall et al., 2020). Hence, they do not apply to our case. Moreover, although until recently it was believed that the overall configuration of the environmental context at the retrieval stage contributes to forgetting in semantic memory (Godden & Baddeley, 1975), this idea has been disconfirmed (Murre, 2021). Therefore, I do not analyze this macro memory cue.

7. This implies that our case is a case of temporary forgetting because permanent forgetting is usually explained by appealing to the unavailability of memory traces (Tulving, 1974).

8. Other groups that are often mentioned in social philosophy are organized social groups, like teams, committees, clubs, and courts (Ritchie, 2020). Since our characters are part of the same organized social group, and since the influence of group membership on forgetting is more significant when an out-group condition is satisfied (Hirst et al., 2018), I do not consider organized social groups.

9. In real life individuals are complex entities, whose identities depend on overlapping clusters of features, e.g., gender, including non-binary genders, sexual orientation, race, disability status, education. A fine-grained analysis should consider this complexity. Since my analysis is coarse-grained, it entails some simplifications.

10. Excluding lack of epistemic trust as a causal factor during retrieval does not entail dismissing its influence at other levels. For example, it may be that Simon’s level of epistemic trust in Mary is low in general. If that was the case, then it could be that he has deemed Mary’s proposal as meaningless and has made it more difficult to remember, even if he has encoded it (Hennessee et al., 2019). This explanation is not at odds with the explanations I propose here and in Section 4 but complements them.

11. This does not entail that *project in tech* has nothing to do with the social world: a project in tech is an artifact produced by humans. Still, one can conceive of *project in tech* as a representation combining pure technical content and technical steps to achieve a technical goal: “product in tech”. In this sense, it is appropriate to qualify *project in tech* as socially neutral. This also applies to the content *general knowledge about the tech profession*. This content is part of the overall content of the schema tech professional, which I will investigate later in this section.

12. This hypothesis is consistent with extant accounts of motivated forgetting in cognitive science (Anderson & Hanslmayr, 2014). However, our case does not fall under the category of active motivated forgetting, since at the conscious level the subject is motivated to recall the target memory and actively tries to do so.

13. If this hypothesis is correct, then our case of forgetting is caused, at least in part, by proactive interference at the retrieval stage, namely a mechanism through which information stored in memory interferes with the retrieval of other information. This explanation is not at odds with the explanation based on inhibitory mechanisms due to de-motivating factors I developed earlier. These two explanations aim at two different explanatory levels that complement each other.

14. These cases have the following features: (a) they are cases of everyday forgetting characterized by a social dimension; (b) the forgotten memory is a memory of another person’s idea; (c) the subject who forgets and the subject whose idea has been forgotten are members of different social groups; (d) the subject who forgets has sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve a memory but fails to do so.

15. Establishing the specific type of harm involved in this case is beyond the scope this article. However, since the forgotten memory is another person’s intellectual product, our case is likely an instance of epistemic injustice, and in particular an instance of mnemonic injustice: a case in which a subject’s epistemic agency is jeopardized by a memory process undergone by another subject (Puddifoot, 2021; Trakas & Puddifoot, 2023).

16. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to consider this objection.

17. For an important exception, see Campbell (2003).

Additional information

Funding

The author has not received external funding for this article.