A new study has revealed that most of the American presidents would fade away within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president.
Henry L. Roediger III, a human memory expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said that by the year 2060, Americans would probably remember as much about the 39th and 40th presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, as they now remember about our 13th president, Millard Fillmore.
His current study, co-authored with Washington University graduate student K. Andrew DeSoto, compares results from the presidential-recall tests Roediger has given to three generations of undergraduate college students (1974, 1991 and 2009) and a similar test offered online to 577 adults ages 18-69 in 2014.
Findings showed several consistent patterns in how we have forgotten past presidents and offer a formula to predict the rate at which current presidents are likely to be forgotten by future generations.
Among the six presidents who were serving or had served most recently when the test was first given in 1973, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald R. Ford are now fading fast from historical memory, whereas John F. Kennedy has been better retained. The study estimates that Truman will be forgotten by three-fourths of college students by 2040, 87 years after his leaving office, bringing him down to the level of presidents such as Zachary Taylor and William McKinley.
According to Roediger the current data do not permit assessment of forgetting rates of the most recent presidents, and do not specify why some relatively recent presidents are forgotten more rapidly than others.
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HIllary Clinton, if elected in 2016, has the potential to be much better remembered than her husband, because her presidency would represent a unique first in American history and Barack Obama may be well remembered for the same reason, he further added.
The rate at which college students forgot the order of recent presidents remained remarkably consistent over time and across different groups of college students. In 1974, nearly all college students recalled Johnson and his ordinal position (36), but by 1991, the proportion remembering him dropped to 53 percent and by 2009, it plummeted to 20 percent.
The research found that with a few interesting exceptions, the vast majority of presidents in the middle of pack-from No. 8, Martin Van Buren, to No. 30, Calvin Coolidge, already are largely forgotten by the average American.
A notable exception in this middle wasteland of presidential recall is Abraham Lincoln and his two immediate successors, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant.
The researchers suggested that other pre-Coolidge presidents who were remembered reasonably well in the free recall portion of the test are Theodore Roosevelt (26), William Howard Taft (27) and Woodrow Wilson (28), a showing that could be related to their favorable rankings by historians and ongoing mentions in popular culture and news media.
Roediger's prediction about the memorability of Reagan and other recent presidents hinges on two core principles of human memory that are confirmed by this study and related research.
First, when presented with information in a long list, we tend to best remember items that are presented at the beginning and end of the list. Second, items presented in the middle of a long list are better remembered when they are somehow distinctive and different from other items in the list.
Roediger concluded that the great stability in how these presidents are remembered across generations suggested that nation shares a seemingly permanent form of collective memory.
The study is published in the journal Science.