Memory Misfires Help Selfish Maintain their Self-Image

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When asked to recall how generous they were in the past, selfish people tend to remember being more benevolent than they actually were, according to a series of experiments by Yale psychologists and economists at University of Zurich published April 29 in the journal Nature Communications.

[...] In their first lab experiment, conducted at the University of Zurich with economists Michel Marechal and Ernst Fehr, the researchers presented subjects with a pot of money and asked them to decide how much to keep and how much to give to anonymous strangers. After answering some intervening survey questions, participants then were asked to recall how much they had given to the anonymous strangers. Crucially, participants received bonus money if they recalled their decisions accurately.

Even with a financial incentive, stingier subjects tended to recall giving more money than they actually did.

In another pair of experiments conducted in the lab and online, the researchers asked subjects what they thought was a fair distribution of money before asking them to divide the pot. The researchers found that only those subjects who had given less than what they personally deemed fair recalled being more generous than they actually were.

A final pair of online studies showed that subjects only misremembered their stinginess when they felt personally responsible for their decisions. When participants were explicitly instructed by the experimenters to give lower amounts, and so felt no responsibility for their actions, they remembered their giving behavior accurately.

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