Kevin Drum talks about research on memory and memory distortion by Elizabeth Loftus. She looks at how false memories can be created with a bit of suggestion.

My good friend Mara Mather at U.C. Santa Cruz also studies memory distortion. Her work is interesting because it focuses on how people remember the details of their own choices and decisions. She suggests that there’s a tradeoff between accurate remembering and current well-being. We’d regret things a lot more if we had the benefit of hindsight and could remember all the details of the better choice we might have made. Some of her papers are online and are well worth reading. I was a research subject in the one on Misrememberance of Options Past. As far as I recall, anyway.