Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: The Role of Episodic Information in Belief Formation

In many economically and politically important situations, people's judgments and decisions require inputs from memory. For example, the decision of whether to vote for a politician will involve recalling examples of their policies and personal character. A consumer's decision about whether to purchase a particular product might involve recalling different types of information obtained at different points in time – e.g., friends’ experiences with the product, statistical summaries of online reviews, or advertisements. This research examines the consequences of different types of biases in memory storage and retrieval for the judgments people form at different points in time. Results from this research may improve our understanding of the role that memory plays in how people make decisions. The present work develops and employs a paradigm in which participants simultaneously receive two signals about a judgment object -- e.g., a potential purchase. One is a statistical signal which is highly informative about the true quality of the object but is unmemorable. The other is a less informative but more memorable signal: an account of a single person’s experience with the object. Both immediately and/or at a later point in time, participants report a belief about the object’s quality. We examine whether the differential memorability of the two signals causes judgements of the object to vary systematically over time. Immediately after receiving a positive statistical summary of a restaurant's ratings, for example, this summary might eclipse a friend's vivid story about their bad experience there; but, with the passage of time, the vivid story might be more memorable and play a more important role in decisions. In a first set of studies, we examine whether and how beliefs change over time because of differential memory decay across the two pieces of information. A second set of studies examines the mechanism behind this differential decay to identify exactly what makes information about a single experience more memorable than the statistical signal. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.