People in psych studies often answer surveys in a 'trance' and forget what they said just seconds later.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
How Long Do Participants Remember What They Said?
PsyArXiv · 3uz7d_v1
The Takeaway
Psychological research assumes that survey responses reflect stable internal traits, but this study found that people have extremely poor memory for what they just clicked. This indicates that many research participants may be engaging in 'uncommitted answering' rather than providing meaningful self-reflection.
From the abstract
Large swaths of psychological research involves asking participants the same questions on two or more occasions. One threat to the validity of such longitudinal endeavors is if participants remember their previous answers. Yet, there is little information on the extent people remember their previous answers in research. To remedy this, we administer six questions to 554 participants and asked them to remember their previous answers between immediately afterwards up to over two months later. Acro