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Autobiographical memory is typically biased toward positive events
- kranner 7y agoTed 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_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
- thewhitetulip 7y agoOf 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.
- danhak 7y agoThis article is about autobiographical memory / recall, not autobiography as a genre of literature.
- thewhitetulip 7y agoIsn't autobiography a written account of autobiographical memory?
- saurik 7y agoNo: 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.
- thewhitetulip 7y agoYet 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?
- scarejunba 7y agoDude, 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.
- thewhitetulip 7y agoAnd 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?
- rdfi 7y agoAutobiographic memory and an autobiography are two different things
- dineshdb 7y agoYes, 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.
- pdpi 7y agoYour 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.
- msgilligan 7y agoWe can thank our lucky stars that the universe at least gave us that. Could you imagine the other way around?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Allower 7y agolol I wish
- acjohnson55 7y agoWhen 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.
- lkrubner 7y agoThis 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/0998997617/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=smashcompany-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=2292ad04b2b6e409785d2e4cdd570c70&creativeASIN=0998997617 https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...