A robust preference for cheap-and-easy strategies over reliable strategies when verifying personal memories

ABSTRACT

People depend on various sources of information when trying to verify their autobiographical memories. Yet recent research shows that people prefer to use cheap-and-easy verification strategies, even when these strategies are not reliable. We examined the robustness of this cheap strategy bias, with scenarios designed to encourage greater emphasis on source reliability. In three experiments, subjects described real (Experiments 1 and 2) or hypothetical (Experiment 3) autobiographical events, and proposed strategies they might use to verify their memories of those events. Subjects also rated the reliability, cost, and the likelihood that they would use each strategy. In line with previous work, we found that the preference for cheap information held when people described how they would verify childhood or recent memories (Experiment 1), personally important or trivial memories (Experiment 2), and even when the consequences of relying on incorrect information could be significant (Experiment 3). Taken together, our findings fit with an account of source monitoring in which the tendency to trust one’s own autobiographical memories can discourage people from systematically testing or accepting strong disconfirmatory evidence.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• nonbelieved memories
• false memory
• decision-making
• cost

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Note that we have not reported our analyses of the strategies that subjects said they would be most likely to use first. The reason is that we discovered these data were difficult to interpret. When we analysed subjects’ “most likely” strategies, we found that they were significantly more likely to pick their cheapest strategy than their most reliable strategy – a pattern that held in both conditions of all three of the experiments reported here. But in many cases, subjects reported more than one “cheapest” strategy; that is, they gave more than one strategy with the same lowest cost rating. In contrast, it was less common for subjects to report more than one “most reliable” strategy; that is, subjects tended less often to give multiple strategies with the same highest reliability rating. For this reason, it is difficult to tell whether people chose their cheapest strategy more often because of a cheap strategy bias, or simply because they had a greater statistical probability of picking the cheapest.