Directed forgetting in the social domain: Forgetting behaviors but not inferred traits.

Abstract

When learning about someone else’s behaviors, people often spontaneously infer character traits and ascribe them to the actor. The present study asks whether instructions to forget the behaviors immediately after they were encountered reduce spontaneous trait inferences (STIs). Participants encoded faces paired with trait-implying behavioral descriptions. Half of the pairs were followed by a forget and half by a remember cue. During test, faces were presented again, and participants were asked to recall the behavior and to indicate whether a specific trait word had been part of the original behavior description. Instructions to forget behaviors did not reduce false recognition of inferred traits but impaired behavior recall unless behavior memory was tested immediately after trait recognition for each face. Experiments 2 and 3 ensured that traits were bound to specific actors during encoding. Our study demonstrates that although trait-implying behaviors can be intentionally forgotten, spontaneously inferred traits prevail in memory.