It’s also important to remember that the changes caused by these memory biases are (usually) quite limited, rather than major alterations. You may remember doing better in a job interview than you actually did, but you won’t remember getting the job if that didn’t happen. The ego bias of the brain isn’t so powerful as to create different realities; it just tweaks and adjusts recall of events, it doesn’t create new ones.
But why would it do this at all? Firstly, human beings need to make a lot of decisions, and this is a lot easier if they have at least some degree of confidence when making them. The brain constructs a model of how the world works in order to navigate it, and it needs to be confident that this is accurate (see Chapter 8, the section on “delusions,” for more about this). If you had to weigh up every possible outcome for every choice you have to make, it would be extremely time consuming. This can be avoided if you have confidence in yourself and your abilities to make the right choice.
Secondly, all our memories are formed from a personal, subjective viewpoint. The only perspective and interpretation we have when making judgements is our own, and as a result this could lead to our memories prioritizing when it was “right” more than when it wasn’t, to the extent that our judgement is protected and reinforced in memory even when it’s not strictly correct.
On top of this, a sense of self-worth and achievement seems to be integral to normal functioning for humans (see Chapter 7). When people lose their sense of self-worth—for example, if they are experiencing clinical depression—it can be genuinely debilitating. But even when functioning normally, the brain is prone to worrying and dwelling on negative outcomes; like when you can’t stop thinking about what might have happened following an important event like a job interview, even though it didn’t happen—a process known as counterfactual thinking.29 A degree of self-confidence and ego, even if artificially produced by manipulated memories, is important for normal functioning.
Some may find this quite alarming, the idea that your memories aren’t reliable because of your ego. And if it applies to everyone, can you really trust what anyone says? Maybe everyone is remembering things wrongly due to subconscious self-flattery? Luckily, there’s probably no need to panic; many things still get done properly and efficiently, so what ego biases there are seem to be relatively harmless overall. But still, it might be wise to retain an element of skepticism whenever hearing someone make self-aggrandizing claims.
For example, in this section, I’ve tried to impress you by explaining memory and ego are linked. But what if I’ve just remembered things that supported my notion and forgotten the rest? I claimed the self-generation effect, where people remember things they’ve said better than things other people have said, was due to ego. But an alternative explanation is that the things you say involve your brain to a much greater extent. You’ve got to think of the thing to say, process it, go through the physical motions required to speak it, listen back to it, judge for reactions, so of course you’d remember it more.
The choice-supportive bias, where we remember our choice as being the “best” one: an example of ego, or the brain’s way of preventing us from dwelling on possibilities that did not and cannot occur? This is something humans do often, taking up a lot of valuable energy, often for no appreciable gain.
How about the cross-race effect, where people struggle to recall people’s features if they’re of a race not their own? Some dark side of egotistical preference, or the result of being raised among people of your own race, meaning your brain has had a lot more practice differentiating between people who are racially similar to you?
There are alternative explanations for all the biases mentioned above, other than ego. So is this whole section just the result of my own raging ego? No, not really. There is a lot of evidence to support the conclusion that egocentric bias is a genuine phenomenon, such as studies revealing that people are far more willing and able to criticize their actions from many years ago than they are more recent actions, most likely because the recent actions are a much closer portrayal of how they are now, and this is far too close to self-criticism, so is suppressed or overlooked.30 People even show tendencies to criticize “past” selves and praise “present” selves even when there’s been no real improvement or change in the matter in question (“I didn’t learn to drive when I was a teenager because I was too lazy, but I haven’t learned now because I’m too busy”). This criticism of a past self may seem to contradict egocentric memory bias, but it works to emphasize how much the present self has improved and grown and so should be proud.
The brain regularly edits memories to make them more flattering, whatever the rationale for doing so, and these edits and tweaks can become self-sustaining. If we remember and/or describe an event in a way that slightly emphasizes our role in it (we caught the biggest fish on a fishing trip, rather than the third biggest), the existing memory is then effectively “updated” with this new modification (the modification is arguably a new event, but is strongly linked to the existing memory, so the brain has to reconcile this somehow). And this happens again the next time it’s recalled. And the next, and so on. It’s one of those things that happens without you knowing or realizing, and the brain is so complex that there are often several different explanations for the same phenomenon, all occurring simultaneously, all of which are equally valid.
The upside of this is, even if you don’t quite understand what’s been written about here, you’ll probably remember that you did, so it all ends up the same regardless. Good work.
Where am I? . . . Who am I?
(When and how the memory system can go wrong)
In this chapter, we’ve covered some of the more impressive and outlandish properties of the brain’s memory system, but all of these have assumed that the memory is working normally (for want of a better term). But what if things go wrong? What can happen to disrupt the brain’s memory systems? We’ve seen that ego can distort your memory, but that it rarely if ever distorts so severely it actually creates new memories for things that didn’t actually happen. This was an attempt to reassure you. Now let’s undo that by pointing out that I didn’t say it never happens.