Never forget a Facebook

If you’re a psychologist you study human behaviour, and so you are interested in the things that a majority of people like to do. If you study things that are popular, somehow you are finding a window into what makes the human condition tick. No wonder then that so much research effort is going into social media. Now, a new study has found that posts on Facebook are better remembered than other information, and we think we know why.

To study this the researchers gave people Facebook posts and sentences from books to remember. The sentences and posts were chosen so that they would not differ significantly in length. Additionally, devices like emoticons, all CAPS, multiple exclamation points and so on were removed from the Facebook posts. The posts were also not from anyone the people in the study knew.

Despite this levelling of the playing field, the results showed that people were one and a half times more likely to remember a Facebook post than a sentence from a book. The question then becomes, with emoticons and so on stripped away, what is it about Facebook-style communication that is so memorable?

To test this, the researchers conducted another experiment to compare recognition of CNN headlines against sentences from CNN stories and comments made by readers of those stories on the CNN website. Headlines proved to be more memorable than sentences from the stories, but reader comments tended to be the most memorable of all.

The researchers think that what Facebook posts and reader comments have in common is that they are “mind-ready”. Since they are most close to speech, and have not gone through the refinement of more formal writing, they are more easily assimilated. Apparently, language generated without much effort is what the mind is most ready for and able to deal with and then recall.

Computers, the internet and social media have conspired to allow virtually anyone to leak their thoughts as they occur, in written form that corresponds pretty closely to spoken language. That makes it memorable…which is pretty hard cheese to swallow for those who have taken the time to learn the craft of writing. It is also a cautionary tale for anyone about to press “post” on Facebook: you had better make sure that you want the world to read it, because they are likely to remember it.