I remember being nice: self-enhancement memory bias in middle childhood

ABSTRACT

Adults tend to remember themselves in a positive way. For example, they are more likely to remember their past good deeds rather than their past bad deeds. We investigated whether children (N = 40) are also biased in how they remember information related to themselves. Using the self-reference memory paradigm, we found that 8- to 10-year-olds’ source memory for mean action phrases (e.g., “Lie to someone”) was worse when the phrases were encoded with reference to themselves compared to when they were encoded with reference to others. Source memory for self-referenced mean phrases was also worse than source memory for self-referenced nice action phrases (e.g., “Be kind to someone”) and self-referenced neutral action phrases (e.g., “Draw a circle”). These results provide some of the first experimental evidence for self-enhancement in children's memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-reference
• memory
• children
• self-enhancement
• moral

Acknowledgements

We thank the children and parents who participated in this research. Thanks also to Chad Dodson for feedback on this work.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Raw data and experimental materials are available from the Open Science Framework database at the following link: https://osf.io/p76mz/.

Notes

1 Due to a programming error, 10 participants were presented with an unequal number of each type of trial. Participants were meant to see nine of each item type, but during encoding these participants saw only eight neutral-other and mean-semantic items, and they saw ten nice-other and neutral-semantic items. Then during test they saw eight nice-new items and ten mean-new items. Additionally, two other participants only saw eight nice-other items. When calculating proportions for memory performance we used the appropriate denominator for each child based on how many of each item type they had seen.