Abstract
People often prioritize their own interests, but also like to see themselves as moral. How do individuals resolve this tension? One way to both pursue personal gain and preserve a moral self-image is to misremember the extent of one’s selfishness. Here, we test this possibility. Across five experiments (N = 3190), we find that people tend to recall being more generous in the past than they actually were, even when they are incentivized to recall their decisions accurately. Crucially, this motivated misremembering effect occurs chiefly for individuals whose choices violate their own fairness standards, irrespective of how high or low those standards are. Moreover, this effect disappears under conditions where people no longer perceive themselves as responsible for their fairness violations. Together, these findings suggest that when people’s actions fall short of their personal standards, they may misremember the extent of their selfishness, thereby potentially warding off threats to their moral self-image.
Highlights
People often prioritize their own interests, and like to see themselves as moral
If people instead tend to engage in motivated misremembering, such biases should be evident at recall
In support of our hypothesis that violating one’s personal standards drives misremembering, we found no evidence of a bias toward self-serving memory errors in either behaviorally stingy upholders (Vexp.2 = 112, p = 0.51, d = 0.07, δ = 0.04; Vexp.3 = 1476.5, p = 0.11, d = 0.14, δ = 0.05, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests), nor behaviorally generous upholders (Vexp.2 = 332.5, p = 0.42, d = 0.02, δ = −0.04; Vexp.3 = 122.5, p = 0.11, d = 0.10, δ = −0.02; Wilcoxon signed-rank tests)
Summary
People often prioritize their own interests, and like to see themselves as moral. It is consistent with recent evidence that memories for dishonest behavior (e.g., cheating) are less subjectively vivid than memories of honest actions[25], and that memories are less accurate when recounting relevant moral rules after cheating[26,27], relevant story details after hypothetical acts of cheating (Kouchaki and Gino[25], but see Stanley et al.28), and selfish relative to altruistic behavior[29] It remains an open question whether people who violate their own moral standards misremember their behavior in a self-serving direction. When behaving unfairly (e.g., giving a stingy tip), people may misremember behaving more fairly than they were, preserving the view that they treat others equitably We test this possibility by leveraging experiments in which motivated reasoning should have a minimal influence— recalling a recently performed action for which one’s standard of fairness is explicitly declared. If people instead tend to engage in motivated misremembering, such biases should be evident at recall
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