Podcasts · Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files

I'm Not the Person I Used to Be (and Why Your Brain Wants You to Believe That)

1 Oct 2026 · 22 min

Why do your good deeds feel like "still me" while your bad ones feel like "a different person back then"? Research from Felipe De Brigard's lab at Duke University, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and in Memory and Cognition, shows that people judge their own past lies and hurtful acts more harshly the further back they happened, and that remembering a wrong act makes you feel like you have changed, while remembering a right act makes you feel like the same person you have always been. The effect holds after controlling for how long ago the event occurred, and it disappears when people remember other people's behavior, which points to a self-protective bias rather than a general belief about change. In this episode I explain how this relates to the self-serving bias, walk through how the studies were designed, and look at the limitations. Terms and citations are on the website at thepsychfiles.online.

The episode on the publisher’s site ↗ (opens in a new tab)