Leveling and Sharpening
In memory, sharpening is usually the way people remember small details in the retelling of stories they have experienced or are retelling those stories. Leveling is when people keep out parts of stories and try to tone those stories down so that some parts are excluded.
Origin
Introduced by psychologists Gordon Allport and Leo Postman in their 1947 book The Psychology of Rumor, the first scientific explanation of rumor origin and dissemination. They identified leveling (messages becoming shorter and more concise) and sharpening (selective perception and retention of limited details) as key distortion mechanisms when information passes from person to person. Their experimental studies demonstrated how accounts change systematically through serial transmission, laying foundations for understanding memory distortion in social contexts.