Spinning the stories of our lives

The way people talk about past events can affect the way they remember them (Tversky & Marsh, 2000). The current research explores how people naturally talk about events from their own lives. Participants recorded what, when, and how they told others about events from their lives. In general, participants talked about recent emotional events, and told them primarily to peers in order to convey facts and/or to entertain. Not all distorted retellings were regarded as ‘inaccurate.’ Participants labeled 61% of their retellings as distorted (containing exaggerations, omissions, minimizations, or additions) but only 42% of their retellings as inaccurate. Social context shaped the stories people told: they changed stories for different audiences; they exaggerated to entertain and simplified to inform. People construct stories as they retrieve and use memories in a social context. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.