New York Magazine
Originally Posted: May 29, 2015
So maybe you didn’t really get a glimpse of Drake during New Year’s in Vegas; that actually happened to your cousin. As it turns out, passing off someone else’s memories as your own is fairly common, at least among the undergraduate participants of a new study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
In it, Southern Methodist University psychology professor Alan S. Brown had 447 college students take an online survey about their story-stealing habits. First, a quick and obvious caveat: Researchers couldn’t verify that these students were answering truthfully. That in mind, here’s what he and the rest of the researchers found:
53 percent of participants have heard someone else telling a story that had been stolen from them.
46 percent admitted hearing someone’s story and later passing it off as their own.
32 percent have spiced up their own anecdotes with details stolen from someone else.