You can change your mind about a topic without learning any new information simply because your brain randomly forgets different pieces of what you already knew.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Belief Disagreement, Instability, and Uncertainty under Stochastic Recall
SSRN · 6468802
The Takeaway
By testing 'stochastic recall,' researchers found that human beliefs fluctuate over time not because we receive new signals, but because we retrieve different subsets of past information. This means cross-sectional disagreement and person-to-person belief instability are often just a result of the random noise in our own memories.
From the abstract
Using preregistered field studies, we show that even when individuals observe identical information, recall is highly heterogeneous across people and varies within the same person over time. Beliefs closely track recalled information and change even in the absence of new signals. Motivated by these findings, we develop a parsimonious model of stochastic recall in which agents store all observed signals but recall each past signal only probabilistically when forming beliefs, while updating optima