Voters rewrite past election predictions to protect their political identities

Following national elections, voters rewrite their memories of the political event and distort their initial expectations to align closely with the eventual outcome. This psychological phenomenon relies on self-serving cognitive biases to protect individual self-esteem and group identity, helping to maintain profound partisan divides. A recent study exploring these dynamics was published in the journal Communications Psychology.

People use similar mental resources to remember the past and imagine the future, a cognitive ability often described as mental time travel. By piecing together fragments of past experiences, individuals can simulate what might happen in the days or years ahead. Previous psychological evaluations indicated that future simulations are usually rated as more positive and important than past memories. Those same assessments indicated that past memories are generally experienced more vividly.

Yet, many of these earlier tests asked participants to generate completely different events for the past and the future, leaving room for a selection bias. Participants might naturally choose happier milestones when imagining the future while recalling grimmer experiences from the past. Marius Boeltzig, a researcher at the University of Münster in Germany, worked with colleagues to test how these mental processes operate when narrowed down to a single, shared public event. The researchers chose to focus on national political elections.

Democratic elections are highly anticipated, widely observed, and deeply tied to a voter’s personal identity. In highly polarized environments, political affiliations can become fused with an individual’s sense of self. By tracking specific elections, Boeltzig and his team aimed to observe how the reality of an event’s outcome influences the way people shift their psychological narratives over time. The team suspected that self-serving biases would warp how individuals remembered both the event and their own previous expectations.

These psychological tendencies are designed to protect a person’s self-esteem and group identity from threatening information. When an individual identifies strongly with a political party, a win for that party can feel like a personal victory, just as a loss can feel like a personal defeat. To capture these cognitive shifts, the researchers conducted three separate longitudinal studies surrounding three major 2024 elections. They recruited participants prior to the European Union parliamentary election in Germany, the general election in the United Kingdom, and the presidential election in the United States.

The EU vote in Germany was seen as a test for the country’s then-ruling coalition, while the American contest was exceptionally unpredictable. A few days before each respective vote, participants completed a survey about their expectations. The participants rated how vividly they could picture the upcoming election outcome, how important the result would be to them personally, and how positive or negative they expected to feel. About a week after the elections concluded, the participants answered the exact same questions.

This time, they answered based on their memories of the actual results rather than their original predictions. This design allowed the researchers to compare pre-election expectations against post-election retrospection. In the United States group, the researchers added another layer to the experiment to track specific cognitive distortions. They asked the American voters to recall the specific predictions they had made before the election regarding fairness, eventual winners, and emotional reactions.

Overall, the results revealed that the psychological differences between imagining the future and remembering the past depend heavily on the outcome of the event itself. Across all three countries, participants who supported the winning political parties experienced a notable memory shift. Election winners began to view the election as much more important after knowing they had won. They also recalled the event more vividly than they had originally predicted they would. Conversely, voters whose preferred candidates lost tended to reduce the importance they assigned to the election after the fact.

These findings suggest that people adjust their emotional appraisals of an event based upon how well it serves their personal identities. If a political result turns out better than expected, the voter mentally inflates the importance of the event. This adjustment makes the victory feel even more rewarding, boosting the individual’s self-appraisal. On the other hand, downplaying a loss helps ease the sting of defeat by making the event seem less consequential.

The American survey provided the deepest look into how people harmonize their past expectations with their current realities. After Donald Trump won the presidential election, his supporters misremembered their initial predictions regarding the election’s intrinsic fairness. Trump voters recalled predicting a much fairer election than they had actually assessed days earlier. According to the researchers, this revision justified their post-election belief that the system functioned fairly because their candidate won. They also underestimated how optimistic they had been before the vote, a shift that likely amplified their positive feelings about the victory.

In contrast, voters who supported Kamala Harris overestimated how optimistic they had been prior to the election. The sample generally leaned toward believing they had predicted a Harris win more strongly than they actually did. The researchers proposed a reasoning for this specific mental distortion in the wake of an electoral defeat. They suggested that overestimating their past optimism may have helped Harris voters rationalize the intense negative emotions they felt after the loss. Believing they had been highly optimistic made their current feelings of profound disappointment feel logical and justified.

These psychological adjustments push people toward a false illusion of consistency. Individuals subconsciously distort their past thoughts so that their old predictions match their current emotional states and political identities. By doing so, they maintain a coherent self-image, but they also strengthen their partisan beliefs. When voters rewrite their memories to fit party lines, they unintentionally reinforce a deeply polarized view of the world. As these biased memories are involuntarily retrieved during everyday life, they continue to shape a person’s cognitive landscape.

The researchers acknowledge a few caveats in their experimental design. The sampling methods and the political makeup of the participant groups varied across the three countries due to logistical constraints. The European and UK elections were also largely predictable, whereas the American contest was highly polarized and uncertain. That specific unpredictability might have influenced the magnitude of the mental shifts observed in the United States. A completely balanced replication across equally polarized elections could help verify the exact strength of these cognitive shifts in different global contexts.

Future investigations could explore whether these cognitive distortions apply to less politically charged group events, such as sports championships or economic market shifts. Researchers could also test whether these same biases alter the memories of private events like academic exams or job interviews. Addressing these mental adjustments on a broader scale might offer researchers a better understanding of how collective memory forms within societies. Unraveling the mechanisms of memory bias could also help global communities navigate shared realities despite experiencing deep partisan divides.

The study, “Self-serving biases shape the relationship between future thinking and remembering of elections,” was authored by Marius Boeltzig, Ricarda I. Schubotz, Scott Cole, and Clare J. Rathbone.