Does everything happen when you are young? Introducing the Youth Bias

Abstract

The reminiscence bump refers to the disproportionate number of individuals’ autobiographical memories that date from young adulthood. A similar bump is found in cultural life scripts: When people are asked to nominate and date major transitional events in a typical life course in their culture, a disproportionate number of the events cited are likewise expected to occur in young adulthood. Across two online studies, we tested whether these effects reflect a broader tendency to ascribe most important events to young adulthood. Specifically, we probed, in adult USA samples, for when individuals expect the most important public event of a typical person's life to take place. Although the occurrence of such public events should be randomly distributed across the lifespan, we found a bump in young adulthood. We found this bump in both subjective (Study 1; probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the public event that a typical person considers to be the most important of their lifetime) and objective (Study 2; probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the objectively most important public event of a typical person's lifetime) conditions. We term this set of cultural expectations the youth bias and discuss its implications for human cognition.

Keywords:

• Autobiographical memory
• Collective memory
• Cultural life scripts
• Reminiscence bump
• Youth bias.

This research was supported by a grant from the Danish National Research Foundation, Grant DNRF93. We would like to thank Annette Bohn for her comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Notes

¹Degrees of freedom were depressed because we focused only on those response options with a sufficient number of responses to permit meaningful analysis. The same strategy was used in subsequent chi-squares comparing distributions across the five-year intervals we employed in collecting the data.