Misconceptions of memory: the Scooter Libby effect.

People often claim they cannot remember, and other people often doubt those claims. For example, during his 2007 trial, Vice-Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis ‘‘Scooter’’ Libby claimed that he could not remember mentioning the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency employee to other government officials or reporters. Jurors found it difficult to believe that Libby could have forgotten having had such important conversations and found him guilty of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and perjury. Libby’s conversations were indeed important, but they were less important at the time he had them than they became months later when the Justice Department launched its investigation. Although important information increases the motivation to remember (MTR), research on human memory suggests that MTR is considerably more effective when it arises before rather than after information is encoded (Loftus & Wickens, 1970; Naveh-Benjamin, Craik, Gavrilescu, & Anderson, 2000). MTR at encoding leads people to attend to and organize information in ways that promote accessible storage in long-term memory, whereas MTR at retrieval merely leads people to work hard to retrieve information, and even the most earnest search of long-term memory is ineffective when information was never stored there in the first place. Do people take the timing of MTR into account when judging other people’s memories? Research suggests that people’s intuitions about memorial processes are often flawed, leaving them susceptible to a host of errors, ranging from the illusion of knowing to hindsight bias (Bjork & Dunlosky, 2008; Dunlosky, Serra, & Baker, 2007; Metcalfe, 2000). If people do not consider the fact that MTR is more effective at encoding than at retrieval, then they may mistakenly expect other people to remember information that became important as though it had always been important. We tested this possibility.