How Long Do Participants Remember What They Said?

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. Across traits that have been shown to be stable, unstable, and stress-testing memory with nonsense items, we show that people do not remember what they previously said. People’s base memory was better for the stable traits, but even asking immediately afterwards people did not really remember how they had just answered. This suggests participants may be filling out our studies in a near-fugue state, engaging in uncommitted answering. This can allay concerns about memory for previous answers for all sorts of longitudinal research, but may point to broader issues in psychological research and assuming our participants are putting in effort.