Caballero, A. & López Pérez, R. (2024). Memory bias beyond ego: Selective recall of positive financial outcomes
Abstract. A recent experimental literature has documented that people are (sometimes) asymmetric updaters: good news is over-weighted relative to bad news. This phenomenon might be due to selective recall (SR), whereby people better recall positive evidence than negative evidence. To test this hypothesis, we ran a balls-and-urns experiment where each subject faced a box with 100 balls, each bearing a different boy or girl name (N = 448). Subjects received a prize for each ’female’ ball but did not know the exact composition of the urn.