The reminiscence bump: why America’s greatest year was probably when you were young

We tend to recall more memories from our youth than other times in our life. And recent work suggests that this reminiscence bump might help to explain one of Trump's much-loved slogans

In 2016, as Donald Trump was busy securing the Republican nomination by promising to "Make America Great Again", a survey of Americans asked a seemingly simple question: in which year was the country great in the first place? Unfortunately, the results were not so straightforward and instead of a consensus, respondents' choices were spread out across the last 70 years. But an analysis by the Atlantic found one factor that seemed to influence people's responses: their age. The younger a participant was, the more recent the year they tended to choose.

This correlation was fairly weak, and it would be easy to dismiss it as a fluke. Yet recent research published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition has found that age is important. In this study, Americans disproportionately chose the years of their own youth as the country's greatest years - no matter how old they were now. This finding is the latest involving a phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump.