🔥 How Memory Biases Are Fueling Your Social Anxiety

Our social memories are emotionally biased, and it gets more extreme with age

A few months ago, my wife and I met up with one of her old friends at a restaurant in London. Her friend had brought along another person we hadn’t met before, and my mild social anxiety meant I was suddenly conscious of wanting to make a good impression among unfamiliar people.

The expeditious serving staff had already placed glasses of water at our table as we sat down. I said hello to my wife’s friend, which went smoothly enough. Then I reached over to shake hands with the other person, but as my arm moved leftward, it knocked over the full glass of water in front of her.

In my head, this is one of those memories that replays in slow motion: the shocked look in her eyes as she notices what’s happening, my gasp at hearing glass hit the table, everyone wondering why water is splashing around between us, all of us grabbing for napkins while watching tap water cascade into her lap from the table.

I remember this as a fairly horrifying event that still haunts me occasionally. However, although we like to think of our memories as high-fidelity recordings of an event, they’re more like emotionally biased stories that change with time. I haven’t spoken to that acquaintance again since that fateful day, but it’s possible she’s never given the event a second thought.

How biased are our social memories, and do some of us emotionally distort our memories more than others do? Research is starting to show an interesting connection between negativity biases in recalling social events and the development of social anxiety as we age.

🔗 The link between negativity biases and social anxiety

In a paper published in December 2023, researchers described a new experimental task called the Recall After Feedback Task (RAFT).

In setting up this task, researchers told participants that their photo had been shown to a group of 120 unknown peers who rated whether or not they expected to like the participant. During the task, participants then saw pairs of those peers on a computer screen and had to guess which of each pair had either liked or disliked them. Immediately after selecting one of the faces on the screen, participants saw feedback telling them whether they were correct or incorrect (in reality, this feedback was manipulated to be balanced across correct vs incorrect signals).

After this “selection” phase of the task, participants had to complete a surprise memory test. They saw each of the 120 peer faces again individually on the screen, and they had to indicate whether they selected that face during the previous “selection” phase. If they answered “yes”, they would then have to recall whether that peer liked or disliked them based on the feedback they saw. If they answered “no”, they instead had to predict whether that peer liked or disliked them.

The researchers also used established questionnaires to measure each participant’s social anxiety and depression symptoms. This allowed them to find links between people’s behavior in the social experiment and their general social anxiety levels.

Looking first across participants as a whole, the results from the experiment showed that people generally had a positivity bias when recalling information about peers. Regardless of whether participants correctly or incorrectly recalled a peer during the memory test, they were significantly more likely to believe that a peer liked them rather than disliked them.

This same pattern didn’t emerge for predictions. In other words, people’s biases were specific to how they remembered events, not how they expected events to turn out.

But how did social anxiety affect this positivity bias in memory?

With a general participant sample aged 18-38 years old, there was an overall decline in positivity bias with stronger social anxiety symptoms. In fact, at the highest end of the social anxiety scale, the bias flipped into a negativity bias in which people were more likely to believe that a peer disliked them rather than liked them.

In another experiment, the researchers analyzed two separate sets of participants with more specific age ranges: the first group were early adolescents between 11-15 years old and the second group were young adults aged 18-35.

This age split revealed a fascinating effect of social anxiety on emotionally biased memories. People with low social anxiety showed a growing positivity bias with age. In contrast, people with high social anxiety showed an intensifying negativity bias with age.

In early adolescence, memory biases between people with high vs low social anxiety were relatively similar. But in late adolescence and early adulthood, those biases were reinforced and the differences in how people remembered their social experiences got progressively larger. You can see a visual representation of this in the chart below.

Social anxiety affects how our brain processes social experiences, and it has a heavier influence as we mature from early adolescence into adulthood. During the transition into adulthood, negative memory biases become a norm in how socially anxious people remember interactions with others. That norm can impact how they choose to engage with peers, reinforcing an increasingly anxious view of the world.

The worst part is that objective feedback doesn’t particularly help to correct those negativity biases. When we’re socially anxious, we are inclined to believe that people dislike us even in cases when those beliefs have been proven wrong on prior occasions by objective feedback.

As with many other mental health (and physical health) challenges, it’s likely to be easier to correct negative social biases if we catch them early. In early adolescence, we are still learning about the social world around us, and we’re relatively neutral in how we remember it. But gradually, over time, social anxiety symptoms increasingly distort our mental stories about how our lives are unfolding. Instead of engaging positively with a social world we recall as friendly and welcoming, we’re more likely to approach with caution as our memory systems plant excessive warning flags.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

#1. Be aware of your negativity biases

If you tend to feel nervous in social situations, pay close attention to how you remember your social interactions and how often you conclude with negative rather than positive judgments. Next time you recall a social interaction with a grimace, cringe, or other negative reaction, take a moment to consider what objectively happened in the scenario. Often, we let a single negative emotional reaction run away with the entire story of what happened when we first met someone. Instead, focus just as much on the positives of the meeting and how those make you feel. Remember my water spilling incident from the intro above? I now spend less time thinking about the water and more time thinking about the pleasant conversations we had and the interesting ways our life histories overlapped.

#2. Never be afraid to reach out

Don’t hesitate to reach out to someone you enjoyed meeting and want to see again, even when you feel your initial meeting was awkward. Negativity biases will make you remember the meeting as more awkward than it really was. And in cases where there really was some awkwardness, it is often quickly resolved by meeting the person again and laughing about it. Friendships are only built with ongoing interaction, and playing hard to get won’t help anyone.

#3. Be your own fact checker

Our memories are stories that evolve over time and they’re not always reliable. For example, we’re more likely to remember recent events over more distant events (referred to as a recency bias), and we’re more likely to recall dramatic events like a plane crash over less dramatic but more common events like a car crash (hence our fear of planes). All of these biases should make you question your recollections. Always be willing to fact-check yourself before relying on your memory or using it to guide your behavior. If you like to journal, write about social events as soon as possible to minimize the influence of emerging biases over time—you can then refer back to your initial impressions in writing. You can also fact-check your memories by asking friends who joined you at events: “am I crazy or did this really happen?”.

“It isn't the things themselves that disturb people, but the judgements that they form about them.”

~ Epictetus

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👋 Until next time,

Erman Misirlisoy, PhD

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