A biased perception of the past relative to the future can lead to inaccurate evaluations of both time periods. When monitoring progress over time, one may be more likely to perceive the past as better than it was. With a distorted view of the past as a reference point, the present day perspective also becomes distorted, perceived as worse than it may actually be. The perceived distortion of past and present events can have an important impact on our psychological well-being and decision-making processes.

Impact on personal well-being

Perceiving the present as worse than the past must hurt our mental health, right? Contrary to what you might think, rosy retrospection can actually have a positive effect on our well-being. In many situations, the bias can make us feel better about ourselves and our past experiences.¹³ One of the earliest studies on rosy retrospection illustrates this effect: A month after completing a lengthy bicycle trip, cyclists remembered the experience as being more enjoyable than they had perceived it during the journey.⁹ This type of memory distortion can reinforce the feeling that we’ve overcome challenges and worked to forge meaningful experiences, boosting our self-esteem and providing us with a sense of personal growth. Regardless of what’s happening in the present, looking back over our past with a positive memory bias can help us feel more content about what we’ve accomplished.

Rosy retrospection can also serve as an important coping mechanism for negative experiences. Research suggests that recalling the positive aspects of our previous experiences can help counteract the negative emotions we experience in our present-day lives.¹³ One study even found that people who recalled positive memories had a lower cortisol response to stressors than people who recalled neutral memories. Interestingly, memories with a social component tend to be the most effective at buffering the effects of negative emotions.

Rosy retrospection has a fascinating impact on our psychological well-being, both enhancing our life satisfaction and serving as a tool for regulating our present emotions. But it’s not all sunshine and rose-colored rainbows. Rosy retrospection can contribute to declinism, or the view that the future is trending in a downward direction (more on this later). Over-idealizing our memories can also cause us to hold unrealistic expectations about the future, ultimately impacting our decisions.

Impact on decision-making processes

Overestimating the enjoyable moments of a previous event, or the positive results of past decisions, can impact what we decide to do in the future. We might be overconfident when making similar future decisions or overlook challenges we’ve experienced in the past. This can be beneficial in some cases—recalling the positive aspects of your last visit with your in-laws can motivate you to plan another trip! However, it might also mean we make the same bad decisions more than once, like backsliding into bad relationships or overspending on vacations that are more stressful than relaxing.¹⁵

Rosy retrospection can also make us ill-prepared to tackle challenges we’ve already faced (and should have learned from). For example, you might forget to apply sunscreen before a beach day because the fun memories of your previous visit overshadow the discomfort of the painful sunburn you got that day. Unnecessary risks like these are a common consequence of rosy retrospection.

Focusing on positive experiences of the past can also influence our professional decisions. A study on Korean military service is a great example here: When questioned about the amount of compensation needed to extend their military service, men who had already served indicated they would need less compensation than those who hadn’t yet served.¹⁴ The researchers suggested that rosy retrospection led these veterans to see their service in a more favorable light, making them willing to accept less money for extended services. Like the experience of these veterans, rosy retrospection can cause us to underestimate the value of our time, downplay the challenges we face at work, and ultimately demand less in terms of compensation or recognition.

When you aggregate these retrospective beliefs, public opinion becomes disproportionately positive towards the past. The political and economic consequences of a biased public opinion can be vast.

Politics and nationalism

Political support for nationalism witnessed significant growth in the second decade of the 21st century. Campaigns that celebrated a past fondly remembered by many garnered support across the globe. The 2016 Brexit referendum resulted in the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union, an effort to take their independence back. The result was of little surprise in the context of rosy retrospection: Half of British adults over the age of 50 reported that life in the past was preferable to life today.¹ In addition to the UK, political movements surrounding a nostalgic mantra have seen widespread support in the United States, France, and Germany.²

Customer behavior

Memory biases can also impact shopping behavior and consumer purchase decisions. For instance, people often hold inaccurate memories about the quality of products from the past. This may contribute to brand loyalty and encourage people to continue buying from the same company, even if there are better options out there. On the other hand, the tendency for consumers to see a brand’s history through rose-colored glasses can influence their expectations about future products, leading to disappointment when new offers fail to align with their positive memories. Many people have positive memories of old Volkswagen Beetles—popular in the 1960s and 70s—though the car had several safety issues and mechanical problems. When Volkswagen came out with the new and improved Beetle in the 1990s, many people felt that it never lived up to the beloved status of the original.¹⁶

Rosy retrospection is a product of how our brains process memory over time. One reason that older adults have a more rosy picture of the past, which for them is young adulthood, may be because those time periods coincide with more emotionally salient memories. Known as the reminiscence bump, the most vivid long-term memories are often sourced from the ages between 10-30, with a concentration of memories of personal events occurring during one’s 20’s,³ when many of life’s significant moments occur.

A cognitive account of the reminiscence bump points to greater levels of hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which are activated to a greater extent in younger individuals,⁴ and play a critical role in episodic memory formation.⁵ Younger people also tend to be more optimistic of the future.⁶ When reflecting on the past, people may not necessarily rely on a recollection of exact events and circumstances of the past per se, but of how one felt during that time, which can be a vivid recollection of optimism and hormonal adulthood.

Aside from age, research has suggested that negative autobiographical memories--the memory system consisting of past experiences that create a personal life narrative--are more complex and decay over time relative to positive ones.⁷ This means that when you evaluate the past, positive events relative to negative ones are disproportionately more accessible than when you evaluate the present.

Rosy retrospection is a reminder that what is vivid in memory is not always true. Our beliefs about the world, about the past, and about present-day society guide our decisions and preferences for the future. Although time machines don’t actually exist, a misguided preference for the good old days can have significant consequences in organizational and political domains, as decisions regarding the future are often a function of some evaluation made in or of the past.

Moreover, an inaccurate view of past events might lead to judging future events unfairly. And without storing negative experiences, you may fail to incorporate constructive feedback. Rosy mechanisms can potentially help to explain why people sometimes repeat the same mistakes of the past.

Though it can be very challenging to counter a sense of feeling that something is true, debiasing rosy retrospection requires a certain aspect of conscious deliberation. It is always helpful to question and challenge one’s own opinions and evaluations. For example, before standing by the opinion that “they simply don’t make cartoons like they used to,” perhaps I should consider such a claim in light of the cognitive processes highlighted here. It might not be the case that cartoons aren’t as great today as they were in the past, but rather my recollection of the cartoons of the past coincides with fond childhood experiences of watching those films. Additionally, while today I can easily point to examples of movies I think are poor, it would be more difficult to do the same for several years ago as I’m less likely to have vivid memories of cartoons that I didn’t care about. This doesn’t mean that those cartoons that were out of taste didn’t exist back then, however. Acknowledging these tendencies can put a brake on an excessively rose-tinted perspective.

What is the opposite of rosy retrospection?

The opposite of rosy retrospection is negativity bias, a cognitive bias in which negative events have a greater impact on our psychological state than positive events. This occurs because we tend to experience emotional responses to negative events more intensely. As a result, negative events may be more salient in our memory than positive events, casting our evaluation of past experiences in a negative light. 

Rosy retrospection and negativity bias seem to contradict each other, but both can apply simultaneously to affect our thinking. For example, you might have a rosy recollection of your childhood overall, but vividly remember certain negative experiences from that period. It’s also worth noting that these two biases are context-dependent. Rosy retrospection typically applies to long-term memories or situations where our emotional reaction to an event has faded. Negativity bias often occurs as an immediate reaction to a recent or ongoing experience, though it can also influence how we recall past events.

What is the relationship between rosy retrospection and declinism?

Declinism is the belief that society is declining and the future will be worse than the present, resulting from our tendency to see the past in a favorable light (rosy retrospection). This is an increasingly pervasive problem today—many are quick to point out all the ways in which society is trending toward collapse. Rosy retrospection and declinism can cloud our recognition of actual progress, making it hard to see all the ways society is better than it was in the past. This biased thinking can stifle innovation as people become resistant to change. It also fuels distrust in political leaders, as we often blame the perceived degradation of society on the people in charge. 

While rosy retrospection alone can have some positive effects on our sense of well-being, it can create a pessimistic worldview when combined with declinism. Overall, declinism tends to negatively impact our mental health and could be a factor in the rising rates of depression worldwide. 

In 1994, Terrence Mitchell of the University of Washington and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern University published A Theory of Temporal Adjustments of the Evaluation of Events,⁸ where they first proposed the notion of both rosy retrospection and rosy prospection. In addition to the rose-tinted view of past events, they also suggested a tendency for people to anticipate future events as more favorable than they describe them to actually be during the time of occurrence. In 1997, the researchers published experimental support for their theory,⁹ where cyclists expressed rosy accounts of a grueling bike tour and vacationers recalled a holiday more fondly a few months later compared to shortly after the vacation.

Our tendency to hold a positively biased perception of the past is frequently exploited in marketing. For example, Coca-Cola often uses vintage-inspired advertising to elicit feelings of nostalgia, showcasing iconic imagery that reflects the artwork and imagery of a bygone era. This marketing move tends to be popular among consumers—some people like old-school advertising so much that they collect vintage ads to hang as artwork!

Rosy retrospection also plays a role in the revival of retro products. Re-launching beloved, old products is a great way for brands to capitalize off the warm, fuzzy feelings we get when we think about the products we used when we were younger.¹⁶ Retro products, improved with modern-day technology, enable consumers to enjoy the best things about the past with new conveniences, like Bluetooth compatibility on record players or instant cameras with built-in selfie mirrors. Brands have been embracing the retro product trend for decades and it shows no sign of slowing down.

Understanding memory biases like rosy retrospection is essential for creating AI systems that accurately predict human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Current AI systems simply lack a nuanced understanding of human perception and how it can change over time, which poses challenges for systems attempting to collaborate with humans or outright model human-like decision-making.¹⁷ Rosy retrospection, for example, can influence decision-making in a way that might seem irrational to an AI system. For AI to effectively work with humans, it needs to understand how we perceive and remember experiences, even if these perceptions are not entirely accurate. Incorporating cognitive biases into AI development is crucial for creating human-centric programs that can collaborate with us empathetically and predict our behavior more accurately.

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign strategically leveraged rosy retrospection through the slogan, “Make America Great Again,” playing to voters’ beliefs that times were much better in the past. During his campaign, Trump pointed to the late 40’s and 50’s as a time when America was “not pushed around.”¹⁰ While many may look back on the 50’s as a decade when the “American dream” was more obtainable and life was easier, it was in fact a decade rife with inequality and injustice, that had far fewer of the conveniences that we take for granted today.¹¹

Whether you’re scrolling through old college photos on your phone, or with a grandparent flipping through a photo album, the experience of reminiscence through the photographs can instill a sense that things were better back then. They may have been more fun, or care free, or simply just easier, but regardless, they always seem “better.”

What’s often not taken into account in these situations, is that personal photos are often taken during good moments: holidays, parties, and vacations. It becomes easy to forget that things may have been challenging then too. There are likely less photos of bad days, and when flipping through an old album, it may not be clear that there were wars, protests, and personal struggle during those times as well as there are today.

As research has shown, photographs are not necessarily used to revive old memories, but to help construct a recollection of certain events we may have been a part of. This can be a slippery slope however, as photographs can create false memories.¹² Though reminiscing over old photos may be a pleasing activity, the act is likely to give a rosy tint to our retrospection.

What it is

Rosy retrospection refers to our tendency to more fondly recall the past relative to the present.

Why it happens

The brain does not always have an accurate depiction of how things were in the past. This view can become distorted by relying on how we felt during a given time period. Additionally, we also tend to retain positive autobiographical memories over time while negative ones fade. This disproportion in memory retention can create a rosy view of the past.

Example 1 - “Make America Great Again”

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign leveraged voter’s rosy views of the past, piggybacking on the belief that America was better in the past than it was in 2016.

Example 2 - Reminiscing over old photos

Looking through old photos can create a rosy view of the past. While today we can easily access the good and the bad in our memory, the story that old pictures tell is often biased towards the positive while neglecting the negative.

How to avoid it

When individuals consider their memory to be an infallible indicator of quality of life, they are often led astray. It is important to acknowledge the things that might have been true during the times we’re recollecting, even if it doesn’t seem that way intuitively.