Memory about animals is biased toward over-reporting danger.

Evidence

We gave children and adults information about animals that they’d never encountered before, using pictures as visual aids. We then tested what they remembered both immediately after the teaching phase and then a week later. Our results suggest that often children preferentially recalled the information about dangerousness over other kinds of information, such as that pertaining to the species’ habitat or diet. Moreover, when our participants made mistakes of recall about an animals’ dangerousness, they tended to more frequently recall an animal as dangerous (when it was not) than mistakenly recall it as safe (when it was actually dangerous). Thus, our recall system is adaptively biased to avoid the more costly mistake of thinking a dangerous animal is safe rather than vice versa (Barrett and Broesch 2012, Broesch, Henrich, and Barrett 2014). — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 1160

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Costly-mistake asymmetry in recall parallels the logic behind asymmetric sanctioning/social-compliance systems underpinning cultural transmission.
• XREF: connects to: Predatory animal imagery functioned as warning to disloyal subjects; Ease of recall biases frequency judgments despite being a poor measure; Threat biases memory, stereotype disconfirmation, and perceived outgroup size. — Walter G. Stephan, Oscar Ybarra, Kimberly Rios Morrison, Intergroup Threat Theory, 17

Broader Connections

• Ease of recall biases frequency judgments despite being a poor measure #expands (0.85)
• Threat biases memory, stereotype disconfirmation, and perceived outgroup size. #corroborates (0.82) — Walter G. Stephan, Oscar Ybarra, Kimberly Rios Morrison, Intergroup Threat Theory, 17
• Predatory animal imagery functioned as warning to disloyal subjects #exemplifies (0.75)