This looked at what sort of details people could most frequently recall relating to how disasters occurred. The author notes that based on other research, people recall “most vividly and frequently the causes that were spatially and temporally close to the disaster itself” (P3), called sharp end factors.
Specifically, the study explored whether the blaming tendency of people, the number of sharp ends mentioned, or a person’s locus of control helped to explain the sharp end effect. It was hypothesised that sharp end factors would be recalled more than blunt end factors.
83 participants recalled details from three disaster stories – in the first instance directly after reading the story and again three weeks later (in both cases without reading the story again). After the final recall session, participants rated which factors contributed to the incident the most.
Different story conditions were used, including stories that had ‘blunt end blaming’ present and absent, and sharp end blaming present and absent.
Results:
Participants in the blunt end blaming condition “recalled significantly fewer sharp ends and blunt ends than participants in the Condition ‘Blunt end blaming absent” (p2).
Interestingly, the sharp end blaming effect “was still present regardless of blunt end blaming manipulations” (p2). Expanding on sharp end effects, it was still evident even when the number of sharp end and blunt end factors in the stories were balanced out, and it was still present irrespective of whether blunt end blaming was mentioned or not.
That is, even if you mention blunt end factors as contributing to the disaster and/or remove the sharp end contributing factors, people still tended to recall sharp end blame. Adding additional blunt end factors didn’t result in additional blunt end blame.
Here, the author notes that the attribution of sharp end blame even when it’s not mentioned happens “because sharp end factors are then seen as nonviable scapegoats compared to blunt end factors” (p36).
Participants’ locus of control wasn’t found to have any significant influence on recall or blaming tendency.
Furthermore, while people recalled more sharp end factors in total, they tended to assign greater degrees of blame to blunt end factors on average.
In trying to partially explain the findings, it’s offered that “people oversimplify the complexity of disasters by focusing on the factors that are easier to understand, in this case, the sharp end factors” (p35). It’s also argued that perhaps because sharp end factors are recalled better because they’re temporally and spatially closer to the disaster itself, whereas blunt end factors are usually more abstract and further away.
In these stories, blunt and sharp end factor info was placed in the intermediate parts of the stories. The researcher found that by adding blunt end info right at the end of the story, it negatively impacted the recall of story details.
E.g. by adding additional blunt end info at the end of the story, people are more likely to forget both blunt and sharp end factors, which the author suggests could be related to the judgemental blunt end sentence at the end of the story catching the readers eye more than the intermediate info (because of memory recall limitations), thereby resulting in them forgetting the intermediate info.
The study also shows that recall and blaming of sharp ends and blame ends are separate processes, thereby following different patterns.
Author: Lea Berkemeier, 2021, Masters thesis, University of Twente
Study link: http://essay.utwente.nl/85910/1/Berkemeier_MA_BMS.pdf
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-causes-sharp-end-effect-recall-disaster-reports-ben-hutchinson
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