False Memories and Impressions of Personality

Abstract

We extended the false memories paradigm to the study of impressions formation. Traits most commonly used in describing person-targets were employed to identify the four clusters underlying the implicit theory of personality semantic structure (intellectual positive and negative; social positive and negative). Finally, we developed lists including semantic neighbors of the traits closest to the clusters' centroid and athematic (non-trait) words. Participants were presented with these lists and instructed to either form an impression of a person described by those words or simply to memorize them. Impression formation relative to memory participants produced higher levels of false memories of lures corresponding to the same cluster of the list traits and the reverse pattern was found for a-thematic words. Parallel results from a gist test suggest that forming impressions implies the activation of a specialized associative memory structure underlying the referred bi-dimensional implicit theory of personality (Rosenberg, Nelson, & Vivekananthan, 1968). "Key words that is [sic] my life: Energy.

Reliability of children’s testimony in the era of developmental reversals

“…With respect to the DRM illusion, in particular, Gallo (2011) showed in a recent literature review that individual differences in the illusion are reliable predictors of distortions in everyday autobiographical memory and more exotic autobiographical distortions, including recollections of living past lives and being abducted by aliens and adult recovered memories of previously unremembered childhood abuse. Further, in the social psychology literature, the DRM illusion has been found to predict false memories of complex social situations (e.g., Garcia-Marques, Ferreira, Nunes, Garrido, & Garcia-Marques, 2010). In short, the above claim, seductive though it may be, is simply wrong empirically; there are ample data connecting the DRM illusion to distortion of memory for complex, real-world experiences.…”

Inferential Costs of Trait Centrality in Impression Formation: Organization in Memory and Misremembering

“…However, the cognitive nature of this semantic structure was never made quite clear. Recently, Garcia-Marques et al ( 2010 ) proposed that the implicit theory of personality corresponds to a specialized associative memory structure. Garcia-Marques and colleagues used an adapted version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Deese, 1959 ; Roediger and McDermott, 1995 ) to provide evidence for a memory structure underlying impressions of personality that shares the same flexible advantages of other associative memory structures and, as a consequence, is also prone to the same performance costs, such as the occurrence of specific and predictable patterns of impression formation false memories.…”

“…Recently, and following the footsteps of Rosenberg et al ( 1968 ), we have showed that the implicit theory of personality can be seen as an associative memory structure organized according to the implicit beliefs people have about which personality traits usually co-occur in the same person (Garcia-Marques et al, 2010 ). The flexibility of associative memory structures has been systematically studied, using the DRM paradigm.…”

“…In the DRM (Deese, 1959 ; Roediger and McDermott, 1995 ), participants are presented with a list of the words most commonly associated with a critical non-presented word (e.g., the words sour, candy, sugar , or bitter , are all associated to the critical word sweet ) and when they are later asked to recall or recognize the presented words, participants very often intrude or falsely recognize the critical non-presented word (in the example, sweet ). Following the idea that the implicit theory of personality can be conceived as an associative memory structure, we have shown that presenting personality traits that load more heavily on a given positive or negative cluster of a personality dimension leads to false recognition of non-presented personality traits that occupy the central positions in the cluster of those presented traits (Garcia-Marques et al, 2010 ). It was argued that false recognition of these traits is due to the activation that spreads from the traits presented at study to non-presented traits that occupy the most central positions in the congruent cluster.…”

“…By using an adaptation of the DRM paradigm and creating lists that include a central trait it was possible to check how the presence of this single trait influences the false recognition of other non-presented personality traits. In two of the following experiments (Experiments 2 and 3) we used the same procedure used by Garcia-Marques et al ( 2010 ) except that the study lists included not the central trait of the cluster represented in the list, but a central trait of the opposite dimension (with congruent or incongruent valence). For example, in the social positive list, the social positive central trait was replaced by an intellectual central trait, that was either positive or negative, depending on the condition.…”