It's delivered like a fact with a long paper trail behind it. In practice, it's usually one vivid episode, sometimes years old, that got generalized into a permanent trait and then never had to answer for anything that's happened since.
A verdict is semantic memory pretending to be a track record
Endel Tulving's distinction between episodic memory — specific, dated events — and semantic memory — generalized, decontextualized knowledge — explains how this happens.1 Once "that time he did X" compresses into "he's like that," the original context and frequency are typically lost. What's left is a confident label carrying none of the evidence that produced it, and none of the counter-evidence that's accumulated since.
Tidy, tellable claims get rehearsed more than accurate ones
Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin's research on cultural life scripts found that memories and self-narratives fitting a recognizable, shareable script get rehearsed and reinforced more readily than ones that don't fit as neatly.2 "He's always been like that" is a tidy, one-line script. "He did this three times over six years, twice under real stress, and hasn't since" is accurate and much harder to say at a dinner table — which is part of why the tidy version wins by default, regardless of which one is true.
Reconstruction defaults to whatever story is already installed
Frederic Bartlett's work on remembering established that recall reconstructs from existing schemas rather than checking against fresh evidence each time.3 Without specific, dated counter-evidence actively held against it, memory will keep reconstructing someone's behavior to fit the existing verdict — which is exactly how an outdated judgment survives contact with a person who has, in fact, changed.
The corrective isn't to assume every verdict is wrong. It's to check the ones that matter against an actual, dated record before repeating them — including to yourself. Related: why you still picture them as who they were, years ago and why your relationship patterns keep repeating.
- Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.
- Berntsen, D., & Rubin, D. C. (2004). Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 32(3), 427–442.
- Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.