Remembering birthdays is easier when it's close to your own

Today is the birthday of fellow research scientists Gian Gonzaga and Steve Carter! If it weren’t for reminders in my Outlook calendar though, I probably would have forgotten. For some reason though, I can remember that Heather Setrakian’s birthday is April 3. I can also remember the names of the other 2 girls from my class in elementary school with my same birthday, April 18.

Remembering birthdays is difficult, but the self serves as a useful mnemonic device for semantic information such as birthdays. Selin Kesebir and Shige Oishi presented a study at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference examining egocentric bias associated with memories of birthdays. Students from the University of Virginia were asked to free recall up to ten birthdays of their friends. Next, participants reported their own birthdays. In their analyses, they simulated data from 10,000 participants by generating random dates between 1980 and 1988, and used these simulated data to calculate the expected difference between a participant’s birthday and all birthdays he/she could remember. They found that people are more likely to remember birthdays that are closer to theirs in terms of the month and day. These findings support the idea that people are more likely to remember self-relevant materials because the self is a well-developed and frequently used construct that promotes elaboration and organization of information.

So the next time you have trouble remembering someone else’s birthday, you have an excuse. It’s likely just not near your own birthday!

Further Reading:

Kesebir, S., & Oishi, S. (2008). Remembering birthdays: A case of egocentric bias in temporal memory. Poster presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual convention, Albuquerque, NM.

Symons, C.S., & Johnson, B.T. (1997). The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 121(3), 371-394.