Archival and palaeoenvironmental documentation of extreme climate events reveals generational amnesia in collective memory

Abstract Collective memory shapes how societies respond to extreme climate events, yet long-term evidence on how the collective memory of such events becomes perceptually biased over time is lacking. Here, we utilise four centuries (1470–1900) of climatic archives from northern China, along with tree–ring–based hydroclimate reconstructions, which are validated against instrumental observations of Wet/Dry Index (1901–2000) to fill the gap. We find that historical records reveal systematic, non-random mismatches, where severity assessments are often biased toward recent experience rather than absolute climatic anomalies. Correlations between historical and natural records increase when the natural series is re-standardised using 20–40-year sliding windows, reflecting a generational offset. A heuristic agent-based model reproduces this pattern, suggesting that generational amnesia is sufficient to explain the offsets in perception of environmental change. We argue that historical archives carry a generational imprint of perceptual bias, in which the severity of climate extremes is judged against recent lived experience rather than long-term climate variability. This has implications for bias-aware corrections for risk assessment, adaptation, and paleoclimate reconstruction.