Partial recall: Personal beliefs may skew pandemic memories, deepen polarization ArtemisDiana / iStock CIDRAP

Personal motivations color people's memories of the COVID-19 pandemic, biasing their assessment of past political actions and complicating emergency-preparedness planning, suggests an analysis of four empirical studies.

"Beyond simple forgetting, recall and ex-post evaluation are prone to various forms of bias, reflecting differences in motivation and purpose (for example, a wish to conform with one's own or the prevailing opinion)," the study authors wrote. "For instance, people are more likely to remember true or false information from the past depending on pre-existing beliefs or previous behaviours in the context of vaccination, political campaigns, or political riots."