Memory and relationships

Author: Semyon Fast, Knei founder

Updated: 08.26.24

Woman touching her head, thinking. Illustration for "Memory and relationships" article of Knei Blog.

How does a human's memory shape relationships?

Hello! In this material, we discuss the connection between the person's memory and relationships they have.

What influence the human’s memory have on relationships building? What memory aspects predict the connections with people in our network? How we can adjust our relations, knowing these?

Let’s take a look at various concepts and complement them by our practical considerations.

Remembering favors and obligations

Humans tend to form an expectation for reciprocity as a default attitude towards others. We would rather communicate with a person who responds to our goodwill attempts than the one who doesn’t care about giving back. Reciprocity can mean the mutual favor or just maintaining the engaging conversation.

We regularly utilize the ability to keep track of favors provided by us and debts taken. That is determined by our basic capability to remember a series of actions, the study "Reputation helps solve the 'tragedy of the commons'" suggests [2].

Forgetting favors you did for others may be fine if you are a giving type. On the contrary, forgetting promises might have lasting consequences on your reputation. Coming up with the options of paying back and memorizing them helps you build reciprocal relationships and maintain the reputation of a grateful person.

Long-term memory stores variety of moves

Long-term memory can provide us with more interpersonal activity options. The study from Ashlock, D., Rogers, N. was performed on artificial agents [3]. For instance, the subjects with long-term memory demonstrated more strategies in prisoner’s dilemma resolution.

Since the variety of interpersonal activities pre-defines our choice of the most suitable moves, keeping a larger “pool” of possible actions is a helpful memory function.

Initial expectations

Expectations about a person can influence what we remembered about them after an interaction. Study from Srull, T. K. (1981) implies that we might better remember people who contradict our initial expectations [4].

Better recall might be explained by the increased time we spend on mental processing to “find a place” for the unordinary person in our system of values.

Put some extra effort into getting to know people who align with your views. Contradictory people may drive your attention, but it’s not always helpful.

Better memory for "cheaters"

The negative impressions might also serve as the cause of the improved recall [5]. For instance, the faces of people labelled as untrustworthy at the moment of exposure stay in the memory longer than the trustworthy faces [6].

This effect can be described as an "evolutionary mechanism." By default, our brain focuses on the faces of "foes". It is very effective when quick threat recognition matters. But in a social setting, remembering potential friends may be even more crucial for survival.

Accessibility of related information

Recently received information affects how we evaluate a person’s behaviour. The study from Srull, T. K.; Wyer, R. S. [7] suggests that the preliminary focus on a particular characteristic (kindness or hostility) before the introduction to other's actions can shape how we interpret them.
Lesser the delay between the priming information and the actual exposure, the more the evaluation can be biased towards the primed trait. In other words, if you think about bad deeds, you are more likely to notice them in others' actions!

Before meeting people, ask yourself: What values would you appreciate in a person? Or, vice versa, what values are completely unacceptable? That way, it will be easier to focus on important aspects from the first moments of conversation.

Conclusion

These were the memory operation phenomena observed through various studies. Despite the academic base, a lot of them look quite intuitive even without diving into the studies. Remember the ones you like the most and stay thoughtful about building relationships with other people. And we will keep discovering and sharing the new aspects of interpersonal relationships. Thank you for reading!

References

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_and_social_interactions
Milinski, M.; Semmann, D.; Krambeck, H.J. (2002). "Reputation helps solve the 'tragedy of the commons'". Nature. 415 (6870): 424–426.
Ashlock, D., Rogers, N. (2009). The Impact of Long-Term Memory in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
Srull, T. K. (1981). "Person memory: Some tests of associative storage and retrieval models". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory. 7 (6): 440–462.
Bell, R.; Buchner, A. (2012). "How Adaptive Is Memory for Cheaters?". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 21 (6): 403–408.
Suzuki, A.; Honma, Y.; Suga, S. (2013). "Indelible distrust: Memory bias toward cheaters revealed as high persistence against extinction". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 39 (6): 1901–1913.
Srull, T. K.; Wyer, R. S. (1980). Category accessibility and social perception: Some implications for the study of person memory and interpersonal judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(6), 841–856.