Memory reshapes messages before we ever repeat them.

Bias influences what we hear and choose to retell.

Context and relationships transform every message in motion.

The way messages travel from one person to another is anything but linear. As they travel, they may bend, twist, or change into something else completely. One perfect example of this happening is through the childhood game of Telephone, where you start off with a simple sentence, but when that sentence gets passed down through many people, it changes into something completely different by the time it reaches the last person in line. Adults will see this happen daily at work, with their families and friends, and through social interactions.

This raises an important question. Why do seemingly clear messages break down so easily? Decades of communication research suggest that the human brain is not a neutral relay system. Instead, it actively interprets, edits, and reshapes information as it is received and shared.

How Memory Rewrites What We Hear

A major factor in the changing of messages is that the human memory is not a perfect copy. It is reconstructive. Unlike any other recording device, the human brain does not store things in a way that would be available for retrieval. Each individual creates an internal representation of what they have learned through their activities and reactions to their emotional and cognitive state. Therefore, when a person attempts to remember something, they will do so based on an internalized framework of previous knowledge, experience, and emotion.

Because of this reconstruction process, when an individual shares a message with someone else, it has already been changed through their cognitive processes and re-created due to the cognitive filtering in their reconstruction process before sharing what they had intentionally wanted to share. As such, the person sharing the information tries very hard to accurately re-share what the other person said. However, the way they share that information often leads them to modify it in ways they are not consciously aware of, and thus to present their understanding of what the original person said as if it were the original message (Dahm et al., 2022). Therefore, they are not actually sharing the original message with the second person, but a reconstructed version of it as they understood it.

How Bias Quietly Alters the Message

In addition to reconstructive memory, cognitive bias plays a significant role in reshaping communication. Cognitive bias describes political or moral prejudice and refers to the way that people process unfamiliar information by taking mental “shortcuts” due to their inability to process an abundance of information each day efficiently. Although cognitive shortcuts can help people make quick decisions, they may distort how individuals process new incoming messages.

The study of messaging and perception suggests that people do not generally encode and convey information verbatim; instead, they select aspects of the information based on their own preconceived beliefs (Polansky & Rieger). This selection process distorts the memory of the original event; therefore, when the individual subsequently relays the message to someone else, they have not intentionally altered the message but are simply sharing what they have constructed to represent veracity at this point in time. Once passed on to another individual, the reconstructed and cognitively biased aspects of the message become inherent in the new recipient’s perception of the truth of the original message. As these messages are conveyed across additional individuals, the information shared becomes increasingly complex.

How Context and Social Dynamics Reshape Meaning

The evolution of messages is impacted by context. Communication takes place between people. It does not occur in isolation. Communication occurs in the context of relationships, which encompass expectations, social norms, and emotions. People naturally alter their speech depending on the person to whom they are speaking. They may omit details or adjust them to minimize the potential for conflict, amp up excitement to keep listeners interested, or oversimplify information if they suspect the listener will not grasp what was said.

According to social cognition researchers, people act as “editors” of the information that they send out. They adjust the content of what they communicate based on what they think is important to share (Higgins, 2022). Editing processes occur automatically, usually without a person’s awareness, so that each time a message is sent, it is altered to fit the social environment at the time of that conversation.

How a person communicates is also important. Spoken messages, especially informal ones, have the greatest probability of being distorted. Spoken communication does not create a permanent record of the communication. After something is spoken, it exists only in memory. When a person recalls something said during a conversation, they must depend upon their reconstructive processes, which may result in errors, omissions, or incomplete information.

Cognitive workload worsens this effect. When we have multiple projects to work on or are anxious or overwhelmed, we tend to take in the information we hear in a simplified format so that it seems easier to process. Communication studies of cognitive load (Fussell, 1995) demonstrate that people will tend to strip away the nuances of the meaning of what they are telling you when there is a high cognitive workload. This simplification will produce a leaner version of what was originally said (the original message), and this may remove significant context and/or subtleties from the meaning of the original message.

The Role of Storytelling

One reason that we see such a widespread distortion of the original message is because of the human proclivity to be storytellers. Human storytelling involves interpreting information and modifying how it is shared. Individuals frequently change information they pass on in order to clarify it or to make it more appealing and/or applicable to a particular listener’s needs by emphasizing some parts of the source message and minimizing or removing other elements from it. These changes are rarely deliberate attempts at deception; they typically result from the need to establish relevance or develop a social connection. The total effect of these relatively small alterations does build over time. Each person who tells or retells a story adds their own personal accent, emotional tone, and contextual framing.

So what began as one message, over time and through retelling by each of the storytellers, will eventually produce multiple versions of the same original message, each affected by individuals’ memories, biases, contexts, and the social processes of negotiation. Importantly, this process does not reflect a flaw in human communication. It reflects how humans make sense of the world. Communication is not a mechanical transfer of data but an interpretive exchange shaped by cognition and social interaction.

Why We Will Never Hear Things the Same

“Inaccurate” exchanges are not necessarily communication failures. They are a natural consequence of how people think and interact. Accepting this reality can foster greater patience and awareness in conversations when messages are important, whether at work, in relationships, or within communities. Individuals can reduce distortion by clarifying meaning, asking questions, and inviting feedback.

Even with careful effort, however, some transformation is inevitable. Every message changes as it moves from person to person. Four primary forces shape this transformation: how the receiver reconstructs the message in memory; the receiver’s perceptions, biases, and prior experiences; the context of the interaction; and the surrounding social environment.

Rather than striving for impossible perfection in communication, understanding these forces allows individuals to communicate more thoughtfully. Recognizing that memory reconstructs, bias filters, context reshapes, and cognitive load simplifies can help people pause before reacting and seek clarification when needed.

Messages may never travel in perfectly straight lines. They bend and evolve as they pass through human minds. But this bending is not simply a distortion. It is the natural outcome of human cognition and social life.

Dahm, M. R., Williams, M., & Crock, C. (2022). More than words: Interpersonal communication, cognitive bias and diagnostic errors. Patient Education and Counseling. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738399121003414

Fussell, S. R. (1995). Social and cognitive processes in interpersonal communication: Implications for advanced telecommunications technologies. Human Factors, 37(2), 228–250. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1518/001872095779064546

Higgins, E. T. (2022). The communication game: Implications for social cognition and persuasion. In Social Cognition. Taylor & Francis. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003311386-13/communication-game-tory-higgins

Polansky, S., & Rieger, T. (2020). Cognitive biases: Causes, effects, and implications for effective messaging. Defense Technical Information Center. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1118282.pdf

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