Motivated-Forgetting

Forgetting Opens in new window has been defined as the loss of, or inability to retrieve information from long-term memory Opens in new window often because something learned either before or after detracts from understanding.

However, not all forgetting occur naturally—sometimes people deliberately forget, a phenomenon known as motivated forgetting. As Anderson and Hanslmayr (2014, p. 290) pointed out, ‘We are .. conspirators in our own forgetting.

We wield control over mnemonic processes, choosing among life’s experiences, winners and losers for the potent effects of attention, reflection, and suppression’.

What Motivates People to Forget?

What motivates us to deliberately forget some of our memories? There are more answers to this question than you can shake a stick at. In the remainder of this literature, we will briefly discuss the main ones.

1. First, and most importantly, selective forgetting of unpleasant memories can help us to be happier.

The most famous advocate of this reason was Sigmund Freud, who argued that traumatic memories are often made inaccessible to conscious awareness through repression (Erdelyi, 2006). In addition, we sometimes use various cognitive strategies to downregulate or reduce our negative emotions.

2. Second, forgetting unpleasant or threatening information about ourselves can help us to preserve our self-image.

Research has led to the identification of ‘mnemic neglect’, whereby individuals remember self-affirming feedback but selectively forget self-threatening feedback (Sedikides & Green, 2009).

Of importance, there is much less mnemic neglect if individuals have previously received positive, self-enhancing feedback on a different task. As Sedikides and Green (2009, p. 1055) concluded, ‘The phenomenon [mnemic neglect] is motivational: it is in the service of self-protection’.

Most individuals are also motivated to have a shared reality with other people to enhance feelings of social belongingness. This often leads us to exhibit a sharing-is-believing effect: we forget what actually happened in the past and replace it with a version of events fitting others’ memories (Echterhoff & Higgins, 2018).

3. Third, sometimes we want to deceive other people.

It is generally easier to do so if we deliberately forget information we want to keep secret. In recent years, there has been much interest in a lie-detection technique called brain fingerprinting Opens in new window.

This involves using electroencephalography (EEG) to assess brain-wave activity in response to various stimuli. Of crucial importance are individual responses to crime-related stimuli having special significance for the culprit.

The focus is on an EEG component called the P300; this occurs approximately 300 ms-900 ms after stimulus presentation and reflects conscious recognition of the stimulus as significant.

If individuals cannot suppress or forget incriminating evidence, we would predict that culprits’ P300 to crime-related stimuli would be greater than that of innocent individuals.

It has been claimed that this is the case. However, there have been many criticisms of the evidence (McGorrery, 2017). Of most importance is a study by Bergström et al. (2013).

Culprits instructed to suppress their memory of crime-related stimuli had significantly smaller P300s to such stimuli than did those not so instructed. Thus, people can use retrieval suppression to evade detection.

4. Fourth, forgetting information inconsistent with our beliefs can facilitate us in maintaining our beliefs and attitudes.

Consider views on climate change, which is currently a hot topic. The memories of many climate-change deniers are distorted. Howe and Leiserowitz (2013) tested Americans’ memories of the previous summer, which had been unusually hot.

Only half as many strong climate-change deniers remembered that summer as very hot compared to individuals strongly believing in human-induced climate change.

Leviston et al. (2013) reported a different memorial distortion among climate-change deniers in an Australian study. On average, they believed 43% of other people agreed with their views on climate change, whereas the actual figure was only 16%! These disbelievers in climate change thought that only 20% of Australians believed in human-induced climate change (the actual figure was 50%).