Rose-tinted spectacles: Trusting partners show memory bias

Why is trust so important in romantic relationships? One recent finding is that it helps people to forgive and forget when their partners do something wrong. American psychologists have recently reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that people with a greater degree of trust are likely to remember their partners’ past misbehaviours in a more positive light. After time had passed, the transgressions that the trusting partners could remember were fewer, less severe and less consequential than they had previously reported.

Researchers have long known that trust is crucial to a well-functioning romantic relationship. But the newly published research led by Dr Laura Luchies shows that one of the ways trust is so good for relationships is that it makes people partly delusional. The researchers found that people in a romantic relationship have a trust-inspired memory bias when it comes to thinking about their partner. In addition to people with high trust forgiving and forgetting, the converse is true.

People with low trust tend to misremember transgressions as worse than they actually were, leading to self-protective memory-biases, and uncertainty about their partner’s future actions. People with high trust who remember romantic misconducts more positively feel more confident that their partner will act according to their interests in future, prioritising relationship-dependence over self-preservation.

Therefore, romantic partners who receive a great deal of trust from their partners may not be as blameless as first meets the eye. This research could help explain why your trusting friend conveniently forgets the misdemeanours of their unsuitable partner. In the light of this research, depending on your level of cynicism, trust can be thought of as a deceiving blindfold, or a beautiful healer of wounds.