Stories, statistics, and memory (11 June 2024)

Summary

This article documents a story-statistic gap in memory. As time passes, the effect of information on beliefs generally decays, but this decay is much less pronounced for stories than for statistics. Using recall data, the study shows that stories are more accurately retrieved from memory than statistics. It causally shows that this pattern is driven by the presence of qualitative content in stories. Guided by a simple model of cue-dependent memory, the authors of the paper experimentally demonstrate the explanatory power of two key forces of memory: cue-target similarity and interference. Our memory decomposition provides striking evidence that retrieval failures appear to be the key driver of the story-statistic gap, rather than partial information loss in retrieved memories.