Temporal Estimation of Major News Events: Re-examining the Accessibility Principle

Abstract

The way in which people estimate when an event occurred and the accuracy of their estimates are of concern both to psychologists interested in the structure of event memory and to other researchers who, for a variety of reasons, rely on the accuracy of people's temporal estimates. Over 2,000 subjects were asked to say when two major news events, Thatcher's resignation and the Hillsborough football disaster, happened. By embedding the questions in a face-to-face survey we hoped to maximize the probability of subjects using a relatively simple estimation heuristic, previously described as the accessibility principle. This predicts that underestimation of elapsed time should be associated with clearer memories. This hypothesis was not corroborated. We discuss which aspects of the accessibility principle can be retained.