Memory
People
When we retell the events of our lives, we do not simply recite the facts, we weave them into a story that has a point. The point or spin depends on the audience and the goals of retelling (Marsh and Tversky, 2004; Tversky, 2004). The spin that we put on retellings of events distorts our own memory for them in the direction of the spin (Tversky and Marsh, 2000). In actual retellings, people admit to distorting their stories 60% of the time, but say that only 40% of their retellings were misleading (Marsh and Tversky, 2004). Similarly, listeners think 60% of the retellings they hear are distorted. Despite the remarkable correspondence of base rates of distortions and detections, listeners and tellers don't agree on the specifics (Oppenheimer and Tversky, in preparation). Retelling to be amusing yields starkly different retellings from those that aim to relate the facts; memory is distorted consistent with spin of retelling (Dudukovic, Marsh, and Tversky, 2004). Similarly, retellings to be factual are predictably different from retellings to convey emotional reactions, with consequent effects on memory (Marsh, Tversky, and Hutson, 2005).