Date: October 17th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: John Conlon

Paper Title: Memory Rehearsal and Belief Biases

Abstract: We rely on memory to form beliefs, but we also frequently revisit memories in conversation and private reflection. I show experimentally that such rehearsal of past experiences generates systematic belief biases. Participants are given a set of experiences and then randomized to have conversations about a subset of them, either ones that reflect well or poorly on them. Such rehearsal has large effects on which of the original experiences participants can recall a week later. Crucially, participants appear naive about rehearsal effects: they take what they remember at face value when later incentivized to form accurate beliefs about the full set of original experiences. Rehearsal therefore distorts not only future recall but also future beliefs. Participants also make rehearsal choices without regard to their later distortionary effects. Intrinsic preferences for thinking about certain experiences instead drive rehearsal choices and therefore belief biases: in particular, a preference to reflect on positive experiences unintentionally generates a positivity bias in future recall and beliefs. This mechanism provides a new non-strategic channel through which seemingly motivated beliefs arise and generates novel predictions in a range of economic domains.

Bio: John Conlon is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University for the 2023-2024 academic year and an incoming Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University, where he won the David A. Wells Prize for Best Dissertation. Professor Conlon’s research interests are primarily in behavioral, experimental, and labor economics. He has published papers in Economics of Education Review, The Journal of Human Resources, and The Quarterly Journal of Economics.