"Nobody's forgotten"

A lot of replays are about an audience. You said "at least it was quick", and she heard it, and now she knows you're the kind of person who says such things. Perhaps she told others. Somewhere out there is a version of you that exists in other people's heads, fixed at your worst moment, and the replay is you staring at it.

So how much of the event is still in anyone's head but yours?

Kenneth Savitsky, Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich ran four studies on this. People either imagined committing a social blunder, or went through a public failure in the laboratory, or were described to others in an embarrassing way. Then they predicted how harshly observers would judge them, and the researchers compared that with how the observers did judge them. People expected to be judged more harshly than they were. The researchers found the reason in where attention goes. The person who made the blunder is fixed on the blunder. Observers take in much more. They see the rest of the person and the situation, and they have their own concerns. The blunder is a small part of what they see.

You can test this on yourself, and I'd encourage you to do it now. Think back eleven years. List the clumsy, tactless or foolish things that other people said to you, or in front of you, that year. I don't mean cruelty, which does stick. I mean ordinary gaffes, of the kind you're replaying.

I'd be surprised if you got past two, and for most people it's none. It isn't that nobody around you said anything foolish in a whole year. They did, weekly. You didn't keep it, because other people's gaffes aren't interesting enough to store. Your memory is full of your own life. Everyone else's memory is the same, and that includes your colleague's.

I can't tell you she's forgotten. She may remember it. Bereaved people often do remember who said what. But consider what she'd remember it as. In those weeks she'll have heard a dozen clumsy things from people who meant well, because nobody knows what to say. If yours has stayed with her at all, I'd guess it's filed with the others under "people were awkward, bless them". It's unlikely to be the defining fact about you. The blank face you've replayed four hundred times was probably the face of a tired woman on her first day back, who'd already heard three of these and had copying to do.

There's another reason to distrust the version in your head, and it comes from research on social anxiety. After a conversation or a performance, some people go over and over how it went. Researchers call this post-event processing. A recent review of that research by Aidan Flynn and Lira Yoon reports that it's tied to negative biases in memory. It also runs in both directions with how people rate their own performance. Going over the event makes the rating worse, and a worse rating prompts more going over. In other words, the replay isn't a neutral recording. Each pass can darken it a little. By the four-hundredth, her expression has had years of touching up. You have no way now of getting back to what her face did on the day.

The objection here is obvious. "In my case people really do remember. I made a scene at my brother's wedding and the family still brings it up." Some events are public and memorable, and I won't pretend otherwise. But if people do remember, then ask what the replays do about that. They don't change what anyone remembers. If there's something to be done about your standing with your family, it's an apology or a changed way of behaving, and that's chapter 9. The replay works on the picture inside your head, and nobody else can see that picture.

What I take from this chapter is that the audience is mostly imaginary. You're the only one who was at all four hundred showings.