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Unprecedented, just like last year

January 12, 2012 Awards, Psych 101

Over at Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling looks at how journalists have a faulty memory when it comes to past award seasons:

I don’t remember where or when, but years ago, I read an amazing article showing how one particular entertainment writer would keep writing, year after year, that THIS year’s “Best Picture” Oscar race was particularly wide open, as opposed to previous years when it was absolutely clear which movie was going to win, or which couple of movies would contend.

And the next year he’d write exactly the same thing.

To demonstrate, Bolling does some targeted Googling of Michael Cieply’s annual observations.

I think this kind of revisionism is largely accidental. As Daniel Kahneman explains at length in Thinking Fast and Slow, people are terrible at remembering past mental states. Not only do we change our minds, we change our minds about what we used to think.

But the internet never forgets.

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