Your boyfriend buys you a flower from a street vendor. A small gesture, but you reimagine it as a grand romantic act, tell all your friends, and weeks later still think he's the best lover in the world.
Sound familiar? The tales we construct about simple events can take on a life of their own—and, according to a study, not only influence our memory of the events but also shape our current views of our partners and relationships.
Ian McGregor, Ph.D., and John Holmes, Ph.D., asked volunteers to read a vignette about a conflict between a fictional couple, then told them to stick up for either one partner or the other. Two weeks later, participants were asked to recall the original story and objectively decide who was wrong and who was right. By and large, most people replaced the actual incidents of the story with their own subjective version, based on the defense they'd been asked to give weeks earlier. Instead of the true account, subjects recalled only their perspective of the story. McGregor explains that storytelling naturally leads to a selective memory. "Details that are embedded in a story get encoded better," he says, "and are therefore more easily retrieved later," so we remember these facts and not the whole tale. Similarly, the way we retell a happening depends on our initial impression of it. If a story is easy to recount and sounds true to us, like the idea that your flower-bearing boyfriend is a real-life Romeo, the gist of the story remains the same in the telling, albeit with embellishment. But if the original incident rubs us the wrong way—say, aforementioned boyfriend forgot to pick you up from the airport—we may tailor the gist of the story to one that suits us better (he was stressed about work and it naturally slipped his mind, for example).
