Yet they have paid little, if any, attention to what Dr. Gopie and his co-author, Colin M. MacLeod of the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, call destination memory: about whose ears information has landed on. While the source of remembered information can be crucially important (Did I read that in The Onion or the daily newspaper?), so is its destination. Our stories, our jokes, our gossip form an important part of our social identity, psychologists say. Repeating oneself is not only embarrassing; it can be damaging, for diplomats, liars or anyone else trying to guard secrets, personal or professional.

“I think people simply get a lot more practice monitoring the sources of information, asking themselves and others, ‘Where is that from?’ ” said Morris Moscovitch, a psychologist at the University of Toronto. “Whereas, it’s rare we get any feedback about” whom we told.

The main finding by Dr. Gopie and Dr. MacLeod  that destination memory is relatively weak  helps explain several embarrassing, and annoying, kinds of social interaction. In one experiment, they had 60 University of Waterloo students associate 50 random facts (a shrimp’s heart is in its head; 8 percent of men are color blind) with the faces of 50 famous people, like Madonna, Wayne Gretzky and Oprah Winfrey. Half of the students “told” each fact to one of the faces, reading it aloud when the celebrity’s picture appeared on a computer screen. The other half read each fact silently and saw a different celebrity moments afterward.

The students then took a memory test. They chose from face-fact pairs: those which they remembered from learning a fact, and those they remembered from reading facts out loud in the first phase of the study. The students who simulated telling the facts did 16 percent worse on the test than the students who were fed the facts while seeing celebrity faces. The study authors concluded that outgoing information “was less integrated with its environmental context  i.e., the person  than was incoming information.”

This makes sense, psychologists say, given what is known about attention: namely, that it is finite. A person who is conveying information, even trivial facts, will devote some mental resources to monitoring what is being said. Self-absorption is also a factor. In another study, Dr. Gopie and Dr. MacLeod repeated the famous-face exercise, with one big difference. This time the facts that the students simulated telling to celebrities were personal (“My zodiac sign is Pisces”). The result was their destination memory worsened significantly.