ABSTRACT
A plethora of research has documented how easily our recollections can be altered through information presented by others. In this chapter, we present data from our own research showing that many of us also change the record of our personal past. The first way is through borrowed stories (Brown et al., 2015), where others’ experiences are presented as happening to us. Samples of college students and MTurk workers support that borrowing a complete story, a portion of a story or witnessing someone else borrowing one’s own story has been experienced by the majority of respondents in each group. The second way that our autobiography can be altered is by actively changing it (autobiographical edits), which can include constructing new parts of our life events or eliminating parts or all of certain experiences. Again, a majority of both samples admit to some of these activities. Perhaps most fascinating are the forgetting strategies attempted by survey respondents. Some clinical applications of autobiographical editing are suggested, as well as ideas for more exploration of how we augment and alter the record of our personal past.
