The motivated memory of noise

Jeanne Hagenbach, Nicolas Jacquemet () and Philipp Sternal
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Philipp Sternal: UZH - Universität Zürich [Zürich] = University of Zurich

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Abstract: We propose a two-stage experiment in which people receive feedback about their relative intelligence. This feedback is a noisy message reminded at every stage, so that subjects cannot forget this ego-relevant information. Instead, we exogenously vary whether the informativeness of the message is reminded in the second stage. We investigate how this treatment variation affects the informativeness reported by subjects, and their posterior beliefs about their intelligence. We show that subjects report informativeness in a self-serving way: subjects with negative messages report that these messages are significantly less informative in the absence of reminder than with it. We also show that the lack of reminder about message informativeness allows subjects to keep a better image of themselves. These results are confirmed by complementary treatments in which we decrease messages informativeness: subjects tend to inflate the informativeness of positive messages that should now be interpreted as bad news.

Keywords: Controlled experiment; Motivated beliefs; Overconfidence; Noisy feedback (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05064934v1
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Published in Games and Economic Behavior, inPress, ⟨10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.011⟩

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Related works:
Working Paper: The motivated memory of noise (2025)
Working Paper: The motivated memory of noise (2025)
Working Paper: The motivated memory of noise (2025)
Working Paper: The motivated memory of noise (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:spmain:halshs-05064934

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.011

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