The survey organization YouGov.com recently did a survey of how people deal with encounters with people whose name they can’t remember. I found it interesting, particularly because I have noticed a slow but steady decline in my own ability to remember people’s names.

The question YouGov asked was: “When you can’t remember the name of someone you’re talking to, what do you usually do?” They asked 7,933 adults this question, and then the broke down the answers by region, gender, politics, age, and race.

The available answers were:

  • Tell them you’ve forgotten
  • Avoid using their name and hope to remember
  • Try to get the person or someone else to say it
  • Something else
  • Not sure

I was interested to see how the answers of older people differed from the rest of the population.

It turns out that (according to the survey) older people are more likely than others to admit to forgetting someone’s name. For the oldest age category (65+), 29% of respondents said they would tell the person they had forgotten the name. The overall population only does that 24% of the time, and those under 30 only do it 21% of the time.

That 8% difference (29% for 65+ vs 21% for under 30) was the second highest difference for any question and any breakdown of the respondents. The biggest difference anywhere in the data was that White respondents were much more likely (50%) to say they “avoid using their name and hope to remember” than Black, Hispanic, or Other respondents (around 40% in each case).

The breakdowns by region, gender, and politics were all less significant.

We’re forgetting things, and we know it. I don’t have a theory about why White people would be extra inclined to “avoid using their name”, but I do have a theory about why older people would “tell them [they have] forgotten”. Here at Kendal, many of us (perhaps most of us?) are well aware of losing our ability to remember things. Names are among the earliest areas to go.

Because so many of us are having this experience, we are more open to simply telling people we’ve forgotten their name. In my case, that takes two general forms. If it is someone I know fairly well but I’m struggling for their name, I say something like “It’s ridiculous, but I’m blanking on your name at the moment.” If it is someone I have met (or think I have met) but have not interacted with very much, I might say “I know I should know your name, but I’m forgetting it right now.” Nobody seems to take offense, but I still find it a bit embarrassing.

Dealing with it. I try to refresh my memory of names by occasionally looking through the “Who’s Here” directory of photos and bios. That helps. Also, if I attend a meeting with someone whose name I tend to forget, I’ll sometimes go back to the email invitation afterwards and see who was invited. Zoom meetings, with names shown at the bottom of each frame, can be a great help.

Name tags are also a big help. I tend to wear my nametag a lot because I know how helpful other peoples’ nametags are for me.

When we first arrived at Kendal, in 2019, I set up an ambitious “flashcard spreadsheet” for myself. It had photos of residents copied from “Who’s Here” in one column and their name in another. I could hide the “name” column and test myself by trying to recall names based on the photos. In writing this blog post, I went back to that spreadsheet and saw that it hasn’t been updated since last January—and probably hasn’t been used since then either.

I need to go back and update that spreadsheet and really work on learning the names (if I can remember to do it).