Ciara Greene
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ciara Greene’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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traits of the person so they might describe the person as being kind but sometimes they're a bit dishonest okay and so you know all the kind of things that we all are to greater or lesser extent everybody's a bit of a mixed bag um and then the participants were later told that these this is a description either of you so other people have described you in this way or it's a description of some other third party okay what they called chris
And then later on, they asked the participants to recall as much of the description as they could. And what they found is that when people recalled the CRIS study, they recalled kind of both the positive and the negative details.
But if the description was supposed to apply to themselves, then they only really recalled the positive details and they were much less likely to recall the negative ones. So again, we have this sort of systematic thing where we're likely to remember the part where somebody said, oh, well, you know, she's a very kind person. but not the part where they said, well, she's sometimes a bit sneaky.
Yeah. So again, if we take that same idea of giving people a summary of a description of themselves or of somebody else that includes both positive and negative traits, the extent to which people will remember those seems to depend on whether or not
people think that those are things that they can change or not okay um so if if people think that these kind of negative traits are are kind of malleable then you know then they're like okay well that's fine maybe I still have those but it's kind of something I can fix but if it's something that's completely um like kind of you know something that you can't do anything about like
oh, well, she's a nice person, but she's really unfortunately short. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about that. Well, then you're likely to forget that detail coming in. But if they say like, oh, well, she's a really nice person, but sometimes, you know, she has a habit of rolling her eyes. You kind of go, OK, well, I could probably change that.
So you could say, oh, I suppose sometimes I do do that, but I'm working on it, you know. So we're less likely to misremember or to forget those details where we feel like there's something that we can change or something we can do about them. And they don't feel like they're a fundamental part of who we are.
Absolutely. Yeah. So we really think it is. And I think that's one of our key messages is that, yeah, that forgetting is not just a side effect of memory. It's not memory failing. It's part of what memory is supposed to do. And that forgetting is functional. It helps us to see the the gist among different things. It helps us to recognize kind of what's important to us and what isn't.
It helps us to hold on to the things that really support us to live our lives. So like, if we think about not just like what memory is, but what memory is for, That memory isn't something that was just kind of created out of whole cloth. It's something that we evolved.
And we evolved... All the kind of... Both the physical and the mental attributes that we have evolved are things that have survived evolution because they offer us some kind of benefit for either survival or for reproduction. So all of these kind of... what we see as memory distortions or memory errors or sometimes called memory sins.
All of these things that sometimes are annoying to us, but actually, really, a lot of these are things that we have evolved to be able to do and they are functional. They support us to live, thrive and survive. OK, so they help us to be happier. And if we look at, say, things like mental health, being happy, having good mental health has huge survival advantages.
So we know that people who are happier live longer. They're healthier, you know, all of these things. So it's not just a kind of touchy-feely, oh, I'll feel better. It's like these things actually have survival benefits.
So we have a lot of work looking at, say, false memories for fake news, showing that people, firstly, that people can very easily form false memories. If I show you a news story about like a political scandal that never happened, there's a fairly decent chance that you will go, oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
And you'll tell me where you remember it from and how you felt at the time and all kinds of things. OK, even though we just made it up. But what we find really consistently is that that is way more likely if that story is congruent with your existing ideological views.
So if it's a story that reflects well on your group or reflects badly on the other side, you're much more likely to form a false memory for that than you are if it reflects well on the other team or reflects badly on your team.
And again, that is part of that idea where we think it's a part of kind of shoring up those social bonds that we're kind of reinforcing that sense of identity with our social groups. And, you know, being part of a social group is, again, a hugely important survival factor. And humans are social animals. We don't survive well on our own.
We live as part of a society and being integrated in a society and feeling part of a social group is a hugely important part of our psychological makeup.
We kind of tend to see our thoughts and believe in our thoughts as objective reality. And sometimes kind of there's a therapeutic technique called defusion that's about trying to take that step back. So to put it simply, it's that idea of to recognize your own thoughts and to reflect on them. So to kind of to see things like saying, for example, you might have the thought, I'm a failure.
OK, you can either say like, well, that means I am a failure, as in this thought has objective reality, or you can take a step back and say and recognize that, no, I'm having the thought that I'm a failure. That actually doesn't mean that I am. I just recognize that I'm having that thought and just taking that little bit of distance and recognizing that not every thought that you have
necessarily holds objective truth that you can take that distance from them and say these are look observe my thoughts observe how my thoughts are working observe the patterns that they go in and and then recognize that
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