In order to make us feel heroic, the brain craftily re-scripts our pasts. What we actually ‘choose’ to remember, and in what form, warps and changes in ways that suit the heroic story it wants to tell. When, in the laboratory, participants split money with anonymous people in ways that they themselves considered unfair, they were found to consistently misremember their own selfish behaviour, even when offered a financial incentive to recall the truth. ‘When people perceive their own actions as selfish,’ the researchers concluded, ‘they can remember having acted more equitably, thus minimising
...more
