Interesting Experiments On Selective Forgetting

There are several studies that demonstrate the existence of selective forgetting in humans. We tend to forget, in particular, all the information related to the aspects that are threatening or frustrating for us.

Negative information about oneself is approached emotionally as frustration. It is also a factor that calls into question the positive opinion that one has about oneself, in one or more aspects. In general, it has been proven that there is a selective forgetting of this information, especially in those matters that are more negative.

Everything indicates that we respond to negative comments or evaluations about ourselves, making use of defense mechanisms such as denial, repression or projection. They all lead to selective forgetting; that is to say, to extract from the experience those data that we reject, by way of expelling them from memory, either by suppressing them or by misrepresenting them.

A revealing experiment

The Central China Normal University and Nanjing Normal University , both of China, conducted an interesting experiment  on selective forgetting. In fact, there were two tests in total and both were intended to prove, once again, that people tend to forget the negative information they receive about their self.

To perform these experiments , a selection of 413 words was first made. These were adjectives that required a positive or negative trait of human beings. To evaluate the degree of significance of these words and their emotional impact, 66 volunteers were hired.

Each of the volunteers had to give a score to the words. If the word was considered powerful enough, it was assigned a score of 7; if it was not significant at all, it was scored 0. For assessments between one extreme and the other, there were intermediate scores.

Based on those ratings, a selection of 80 words was made. Half of them corresponded to positive traits, while the remaining 40 described negative aspects. Those who participated in this first part of the experiment were disqualified from being part of the second phase.

An attribution experience

For the first experiment, or the second phase of the study, 39 paid volunteers were recruited, ranging in age from 18 to 24 years, with a mean age of 20 years. Among these, 27 were women and 12 men; none of them reported having or having had any kind of emotional or mental disorder.

Each of the volunteers was given the list of selected words, presented on a computer screen at random. They were asked to write “I” in front of each word if they thought they had the trait the word alluded to . If not, they should write the word “HE”, which meant that they saw that trait in others, but not in themselves.

At the end of this experiment, everyone was asked to count down numbers from 1 to 100 for 5 minutes . The objective was to produce a thought cut, occupying the minds of the experimental subjects so that they did not mentally review the attribution of traits that they had just made.

The second experiment

The participants in the first experiment were convinced that the test ended with the attribution of traits. None of them knew there was a last phase. In this they were asked to try to replicate the results . That is to say, that they remember which traits they had marked as their own and which they had marked as alien.

The results showed that the participants were more accurate in repeating the attributions they had made to “HIM”, whether they were positive or negative. Regarding the evaluations that they had made of “I”, they showed that there was less precision. In general, they attributed to themselves more positive traits than the initial ones.

For the researchers, these results support the hypothesis that people tend to forget the data they consider negative about themselves. That bias seems to operate most strongly when negative attributions are made in public, as was the case in the experiment. It is possible that, if the trials had been carried out internally – without them becoming known to others – the result would have been different.