The Worth: Erasing an Embarrassing Memory

“What’s the value of ignorance?”

Everyone has things they would prefer to forget: painful social gaffes, mortifying drunken behaviour, and questionable 80s haircuts. Accordingly, for this Dectech Bite, we thought we’d investigate the price people would place on deleting the embarrassing memory of their choice.

And with the arrival of memory-editing technology, publicised by futurist TV documentaries and news articles, this question suddenly seems less hypothetical. So how much would people pay to forget an uncomfortable experience?

Not very much, as it happens. Only 26% of respondents are willing to pay more than £20, which pales when compared to the 54% of people who would pay that amount to make new memories over dinner with their preferred guest .  Why?  Our analysis suggests at least two reasons.

First, we found that older respondents are less willing to pay. With a bigger list of reminiscences over a longer history, individual memories become either more marginal compared to an accumulated corpus of stupidity or less emotive with the passage of time.

Second, people who recall a specific memory are 8% more willing to pay.  In other words, people will pay for memory erasing.  You just have to help them recall a truly excruciating memory first.

Or, of course, people simply like their embarrassing memories and contained therein, their chance of going viral.