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

Abstract

An extension of the DRM paradigm was used to study the impact of central traits (Asch, 1946) in impression formation. Traits corresponding to the four clusters of the implicit theory of personality—intellectual, positive and negative; and social, positive and negative (Rosenberg et al., 1968)—were used to develop lists containing several traits of one cluster and one central trait prototypical of the opposite cluster. Participants engaging in impression formation relative to participants engaging in memorization not only produced higher levels of false memories corresponding to the same cluster of the list traits but, under response time pressure at retrieval, also produced more false memories of the cluster corresponding to the central trait. We argue that the importance of central traits stems from their ability to activate their corresponding semantic space within a specialized associative memory structure underlying the implicit theory of personality.

Explaining the relationship between Agency and Communion by means of Lay Personality Theories and Connectionist Modelling

“…There are studies supporting this assumption. Using the false memory paradigm, researchers showed (Garcia-Marques et al, 2010;Nunes et al, 2017) that presenting participants with personality traits that were more heavily related to one of the four Big Two clusters of content (e.g., friendly) led to higher false recognition of non-presented traits that were central to a given cluster (e.g., warm). Researchers argued that false recognition effects occurred because of the activation that spread from presented traits to non-presented traits, central for a given cluster.…”