Unconscious Memory Updating

Gregory Markus conducted what is now a classic US study of the consistency of political beliefs of individuals tracked over a nine-year period. The study examines how individuals' attitudes shifted from liberal to conservative positions over time[i].

(I make no judgment here on either conservative or liberal political identification, and I note that these words mean very different things in the USA and in the European political tradition.)

Crucially, respondents were asked to state how conservative they remember they were on the previous occasion that their conservatism was measured. This allows you to compare what people say now with what they said previously about their political orientation.

The results were striking: people remembered themselves as being more conservative nine years before than they actually were at that time. Their recall of what they were like at some point in the past was modified to be consistent with their present political attitudes.

How we remember our own prior political positions can therefore be very unreliable – we may be utterly blind to the subtle revisions we make to our memories.

Markus concludes:

these results are not artifacts of survey measurement problems. Instead, they indicate that policy attitudes generally do not have strong cognitive representations, are eminently changeable, and once they are changed, an individual's cognitive autobiography is revised so as to render the changes invisible.

Our memories are more concerned with what we think in the present moment and how we might anticipate or reimagine the future than they are with veridically recalling the past. In fact, we may subtly and non-consciously update our memories of what we used to think to make our memories conform to our present views!

Moreover, all the shouting in the media by journalists regarding "gotcha" moments over apparent inconsistencies in people’s attitudes and political positions over time is just that — howling into the void. People do change their views through time, and why not? Life changes you.

The purpose of our memories is not to accurately log the past: Instead, our memories are designed to allow us to adapt to the present and anticipate the future [ii].

Beyond that, we do not — repeat, do not — have a specialised cognitive faculty that tracks changes in our memory through time, comparing what we thought at time A to time B to time C, and which allows us to rationally account for those changes in memory.

Life’s too short for that.

Allegiance First — Consistency Is Down the List

The bottom line is straightforward: Rational models of political identification where it might be assumed that people carefully and coolly consider policy platforms of political parties and vote accordingly really should be discarded. This is hardly news.

Instead, it seems our political identity is quite fluid, subject to the vagaries of time and memory, and our political identity updates and reforms itself in differing and perhaps unpredictable ways over time.

It seems, though, our allegiance comes first, and has primacy over our beliefs — which are more like details, to be filled in and elaborated later, depending on the "identity lens" that we view the world through.

There is a plasticity of response and a capacity to change one’s own political position quite rapidly. Political affiliations are not enduring reflections of some underlying, unchanging, and enduring personality trait that we easily self-report on — even though our political identity is often central to our sense of ourselves.