Life through rose-tinted spectacles
When life becomes difficult, almost all of us will have thought that things aren’t as good as they used to be. If you’ve never said something like this to yourself, you are an admirable exception.
Do we have a rose-tinted view of the past? Does life really get worse as we age? Or is this evidence of faulty, or at best, selective, recall, and if it is, why do we do it?
There’s plenty of evidence that our memories tend not only to be inaccurate, but also – as Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues have shown through work on eyewitness testimony – liable to change, depending on our circumstances and on the words someone chooses if they ask us to recall an event.
Furthermore, logic tells us that things can’t all be on a continual downward spiral: for example, how can we square that with our knowledge of the many health-giving breakthroughs in science and technology?
One reason we tend to think of the past as “better” is because when we think about past phenomena, we don’t subject them to a fair comparison. Carey Morewedge, at Carnegie Mellon Institute, illustrated this double standard in a series of experiments.
She began by asking participants to rate films and music, some current and some older. She then selected offerings of similar “likeability” and asked a new set of participants to rate the selections. These participants considered the films and music from the past to be superior. When asked how they arrived at their decisions, she found they’d compared the current items with other current offerings to determine worth, whereas when recalling past songs and films, they’d didn’t make any such comparisons – instead, they simply rated how much they enjoyed each one.
This tendency to think fondly about the past increases with age, as Jennifer Tomaszezyk and Myra Fernandez, at the University of Waterloo, discovered. They asked participants to write descriptions of a number of personal events, each triggered by positive, negative, or neutral cue words. They then asked them to rate each memory for level of positivity, and later, to recall as many of these memories as possible.
The older participants remembered more positive events than their younger counterparts, and they also rated all their memories as more positive generally. Mara Mather and Laura Carstensen, academics at the Stanford Center on Longevity, suggest this is because as we age, we find it increasingly gratifying to remember positive past events.
As a consequence, we start to think about our positive memories more often than unhappy ones, thereby consistently reinforcing the view of the past as a happy time.
There’s nothing bad about remembering positive past events more readily than negative ones – in fact, there’s plenty of evidence to show this helps boost mood. Just remember you’re being more selective about what happened long ago than you are when you evaluate what’s going on right now.