If this were a Facebook post, you would
remember it – better than a stranger’s face or a line from a published
book. That, in fewer than 140 characters, is the finding of research from
the University of California, San Diego and the University of Warwick, published
in the Springer journal Memory & Cognition. Oh, and: The small,
social-networking faux pas you were hoping would fade from your friends’
memories real soon…? Don’t count on it. Sorry. :/
In “Major Memory for Microblogs,” the researchers
report that Facebook status updates were about one and a half times more
memorable than sentences from books and almost two and a half times more
memorable than faces.
And these were not the status
updates of the study participants’ friends but rather 200 anonymous posts
(gathered by undergraduate assistants blind to the hypothesis). The tests were
self-paced recognition tests.
“We were really surprised,” said first author
Laura Mickes, doctoral alumna of UC San Diego’s department of psychology, now a
visiting scholar at UC San Diego and a senior research fellow at the University
of Warwick. “These kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the
differences between amnesiacs and people with healthy memory.”
Mickes, along with senior authors and UC San
Diego psychology professors Christine Harris and Nicholas Christenfeld,
wondered what it was about the Facebook updates that made them so memorable:
Brevity? That they were complete thoughts? Gossipy, chatty, what?
First, the researchers made sure that the
posts didn’t differ substantially in length from published book sentences. Then
they removed all orthographic irregularities that are pretty standard in
informal digital communication – emoticons, all-CAPS, multiple exclamation
points and the like – in case these were providing a mnemonic advantage. Still
and still, Facebook posts were significantly more memorable.
“Not only is the ‘Facebook effect’ on memory
strong,” said Harris, “but we replicated the effect each time we examined it.”
The possibility that Facebook-styled language
was stimulating people to think in social terms – reminding participants of
familiar people or even characters, which is known to strengthen memory – was
also tested and didn’t seem to account for the difference.
Investigating further, the researchers ran
some follow-up experiments. They compared recognition of CNN headlines,
sentences drawn from CNN stories and reader comments on those stories, in two
categories: Breaking News and Entertainment.
As expected, headlines were more memorable
than random sentences, supporting the notion that at least some of the
memorability of Facebook posts is due to their completeness. Entertainment
headlines and sentences were more memorable than the hard-news ones, supporting
the idea that “gossipiness” probably contributes to memorability, too.
But most striking was that reader comments
were the most memorable of all. Like Facebook posts, reader comments were
remembered exceptionally well.
Why? Because, the researchers suspect, these
digital communications are “mind-ready.” Virtual chatter is pretty close to
actual chatting in real life – to what we “naturally put out.” Language we
generate without much effort, it seems, is both what we ingest most willingly
and readily – and what we remember best.
“Facebook is updated roughly 30 million times
an hour so it’s easy to dismiss it as full of mundane, trivial bits of
information that we will instantly forget as soon as we read them,” Mickes
said. “But our study turns that view on its head, and by doing so gives us a
really useful glimpse into the kinds of information we’re hardwired to
remember.”
Our language capacity did not evolve to
process carefully edited and polished text, said UC San Diego psychology
professor Christenfeld. “One could view the past 5,000 years of
painstaking, careful writing as the anomaly. Modern technologies allow
written language to return more closely to the casual, personal style of
pre-literate communication. This is the style that resonates, and is remembered.”
So, a couple of lessons, then. For those in
education, advertising, communication: Relax. Write and present as effortlessly
as you can. And for denizens of the digital 21st century in general: Stop for a
sec. Pause before you hit that button to post the latest emanation of your
mind. It won’t be soon forgotten.
No need to tip this waiter! A
sci-fi restaurant in China has employed robots to work as waiters, cooks,
entertainers and receptionists.
