title: Does everything happen when you are young? Introducing the youth bias.
abstract: The reminiscence bump refers to the disproportionate number of individuals' autobiographical memories that date from young adulthood. A similar bump is found in cultural life scripts: When people are asked to nominate and date major transitional events in a typical life course in their culture, a disproportionate number of the events cited are likewise expected to occur in young adulthood. Across two online studies, we tested whether these effects reflect a broader tendency to ascribe most important events to young adulthood. Specifically, we probed, in adult USA samples, for when individuals expect the most important public event of a typical person's life to take place. Although the occurrence of such public events should be randomly distributed across the lifespan, we found a bump in young adulthood. We found this bump in both subjective (Study 1; probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the public event that a typical person considers to be the most important of their lifetime) and objective (Study 2; probing cultural expectations for the expected timing of the objectively most important public event of a typical person's lifetime) conditions. We term this set of cultural expectations the youth bias and discuss its implications for human cognition.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology, Center on Autobiographical Memory Research , Aarhus University , Aarhus , Denmark.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Koppel
authors.forename: Dorthe
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Berntsen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D008875:Middle Aged; D014481:United States; D055815:Young Adult