Autobiographical memory is typically biased toward positive events | Hacker News Reader

Autobiographical memory is typically biased toward positive events

psycnet.apa.org

36 pointslaurex18 comments

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We can thank our lucky stars that the universe at least gave us that. Could you imagine the other way around?

Is this also a byproduct of bias?(gratitude)

>Could you imagine the other way around?

Many of us don't have to.

Couldn't have asked for a better answer to “is my brain doing something wonky or am I just an edgy slacker?”

When I was a public school teacher in Baltimore (ten years later, I still start so many of my sentences this way), I would have days that were completely insane. One of my many responsibilities was to call parents to discuss behavior issues at the end of the day.

I realized at some point that I was literally forgetting what happened. I took anecdotal notes to be able to accurately describe behavioral situations, and rereading them mere hours later, I couldn't actually autibiographically recall many of these incidents.

I think it's what allowed me to have normalish evenings after insane work days. Otherwise, the stress would be completely overwhelming.

Ted Chiang's short story 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' is very relevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

This can lead to bias about whole categories of experience, for instance, starting a business. If you only hear the success stories then you start to think it is easy. You might intellectually be aware that 90% of all businesses fail, but that anecdote doesn’t carry as much emotional weight as hearing people’s joyful stories of success. That’s why I think it is important that we document some of the failures and we do it while the memories are still fresh and when we still have access to documents such as email and Slack messages that can offer the gritty details of what went wrong. That ideal if accuracy and specifics are very much what guided me when I wrote this:

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

Of course it is. The people who write autobiography are the ones who are telling their own story. They are heavily invested in telling only the good parts.

Which is why I liked Warren Buffet's approach, let the writer write after talking with people. No interference. Of course, his is a biography.

This article is about autobiographical memory / recall, not autobiography as a genre of literature.

Isn't autobiography a written account of autobiographical memory?

No: one could easily imagine a world where you remember all of the bad stuff, but are still incentivized to not write it down; an autobiography is an edited work of text, while autobiographical memory is a capability of a human.

Yet autobiography is written by the person telling her own story.

You could remember bad stuff but you are not incentized to write it down.

Then how are they both different?

Dude, it's saying the things you remember about your history are biased positive. There is no writing down, there is no telling, there is no other person involved here. You are remembering your own past. In this past story, you bias positive in the things you remember.

And when you remember it positively, would it not translate to written autobiographical accounts to be biased?

Won't there be a correlation?

Or am I missing something?

Autobiographic memory and an autobiography are two different things

Yes, there can be but here try to remove the context of writing it altogether. You tend to remember positive memories more than negative memories. That's how our memory works. Period.

Your memories are a function of what actually happened. What you write is a function of what you remember. Two separate processes.

Bias on how you retell your own story is, as you say, a fairly obvious concern, so (for the purposes of this discussion) written autobiographies being biased is completely uninteresting.

Rather, it's the fact that your recollection of events biases towards the positive that's the novel, interesting information.

So you agree there is a correlation and yet you somehow disagree with me. Let's agree to disagree

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