Chances are, if you’re spending this holiday with friends and/or family, you’ll turn to someone with a story you’re sure they’ll love only to find, embarrassingly, that they did love it — the first two times you told it to them.

Memory can break down in a lot of ways (and here‘s a good book on it, if you’re interested). Two ways are to forget the source of information — where we learned something — and to forget the destination of information — who we told it to.

Source memory breakdown is common, and generally not a very bad thing unless 1) you’re a terrible critical thinker and an undiscriminating reader, in which case you’re going to wind up believing a lot of half-baked things*, or 2) you’re a writer and you’re trying to look something up. (I’ve been meaning to do a post for months now on something Alfred Adler used to ask his patients, except I can’t find the original source anywhere.) Socially, source-memory breakdown can be embarrassing if you’re telling someone a joke and, when you get to the punchline, they fill it in for you and say, “I told you that joke last Thanksgiving.” People tend to think that kind of faux pas is funny, though.

It’s a bit more annoying to be told the same story over and over, which is what will happen when a person has breakdown of destination memory. This is as common, yet much less studied, than breakdown of source memory. In my wholly non-scientific appraisal, marriage is a great contributor to destination-memory breakdown, as the question, “Did I tell you X, or did I only think it?” implies.

Some researchers — and this is what I’ve been getting to, if anyone’s curious — have started looking into destination-memory breakdown. Their initial finding suggests that part of the reason we forget who we told things to is because we are too focused on ourselves as the teller, and not on the listener. As a research psychologist, I have some methodological quibbles with their experiment, but as an etiquette columnist, I have to say, that’s a terrific lesson learned.

No matter where you learned it.

*Of course, if you’re not a critical thinker, good source memory can only help you so far. On my bulletin board, I have a letter from a woman to the editors of Readers’ Digest, which had published a laudatory article on J.K. Rowling. The letter-writer was angry that RD did not point out that Ms. Rowling is an acknowledged Satan worshipper, who has led some 14 million children to the Chuch of Satan through her best-selling series. The source of this information, the letter writer proudly reported, was The Onion. (And the editors’ reply, I must say, was a freaking masterpiece of tact.) Now quick, go tell a friend that story while you still remember that you read it on Robin Abrahams’s blog.