Age and Gender Differences in the Borrowing of Personal Stories

ABSTRACT

Background

In prior research, about half of undergraduate students claimed to have “borrowed” a story, by telling someone else’s autobiographical memory as if it was their own. Given that borrowing stories often involves intentional fabrication, and given that there are age-related declines in lying, we hypothesized that reports of intentionally borrowing stories should decline with age.

Methods

We recruited participants who ranged in age from 18 to 86 and asked them to complete an online retrospective survey about borrowing stories.

Results

Consistent with our hypothesis, older age was associated with lower reports of borrowing stories. Furthermore, among people who did report borrowing a story, older age was associated with less frequent story borrowing and less recent story borrowing.

Conclusion

These findings highlight the importance of using age-diverse samples when examining social memory phenomena. Findings based upon undergraduate students do not always replicate in other age groups.

Acknowledgment

Thanks are due to Dr. Elizabeth J. Marsh for providing us with the instructions and questions used in Brown, Croft Caderao, Fields, and Marsh (2015).

Disclosure Statement

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

Data Availability Statement

Data is available at DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/EWBY9.

Notes

1. As described in our Procedure, participants were first asked if they had ever intentionally borrowed a story. If participants indicated that they had ever done so, they were next asked to describe the most recent time this had occurred. Within these open-ended responses, it was clear that 12 individuals had selected the wrong option to the previous question and had never borrowed a story (e.g., “I haven’t ever borrowed anything as far as I can remember”). We re-coded these individuals’ earlier response to reflect this and considered them as “non-borrowers” for all subsequent analyses.

2. We also tested a model including an interaction between age and gender for both the frequency and recency of story borrowing. This interaction term was significant; however, 35 pairwise comparisons were required to follow up on this analysis. This resulted in a Bonferroni corrected α of .001. None of the pairwise comparisons met this threshold, so these analyses are reported without the interaction term.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no external funding. Participant compensation came from the corresponding author’s departmental funds.