Person memory and judgments: The impact of information that one is told to disregard.

Abstract

Subjects read a series of behaviors with instructions to form an impression of the person who performed them. In some conditions, subjects were told after reading the behaviors that an administrative error had been made and that certain ones should be disregarded. If the behaviors that subjects were told to disregard were descriptively unrelated to the other behaviors in the series, their influence on trait judgments was greatest when they were presented last. If the behaviors to be disregarded were descriptively inconsistent with the remaining behaviors, their influence was greatest when they were first in the series but subjects were not told to ignore them until after the remaining ones were presented. If the to-be-disregarded behaviors implied the same trait as the remaining ones, they had an influence on trait judgments in both of these conditions. All of these effects were consistently greater when the trait implied by the behaviors to be disregarded was favorable. In fact, when behaviors implied an unfavorable trait, instructions to disregard them often led the behaviors to have a contrast effect on trait judgments. Subjects appeared to base their judgments on implications of the cognitive representations they formed of the person at the time information was first presented. They then adjusted these subjective judgments at the time they reported them to compensate for the influence they perceived the to-be-disregarded information to have, making relatively greater adjustments when this information was unfavorable than when it was favorable. An additional experiment provided further evidence of adjustment processes, but it indicated that subjects also base their judgments on a partial review of the information they have received. A general model of person memory and judgment proposed by Wyer and Unverzagt (1985) provided a satisfactory account of the results of these studies.

Processing exaggerated advertising claims

“…More specific attribute beliefs may not be affected as they are at a different level of abstraction (Hawkins et al, 2001). The prediction that a global evaluation of the brand will be affected by puffery, even though the claim is ultimately determined to be untrue, is consistent with a larger body of research that finds that people are particularly poor at rejecting, ignoring or failing to believe what they have comprehended (Bjork, 1972;Schul and Burnstein, 1985;Wyer and Budesheim, 1987), even when they are forewarned that the information will be false (Gilbert et al, 1990). The outcome of this comprehension process is also consistent with dissociations found between perceptions of truth and belief (Begg et al, 1992).…”

Trait Inferences as a Function of Automatically Activated Racial Attitudes and Motivation to Control Prejudiced Reactions

“…For example, Lambert, Khan, Lickel, and Fricke (1997) presented evidence that perceivers tend to view the negative implications of a stereotype as a more inappropriate basis for judgment than the positive implications and, hence, correct more for negative stereotypes than for positive ones. Similarly, Wyer and Budesheim (1987) found greater adjustment when participants were instructed to disregard previously presented unfavorable information about a target than when they were to disregard favorable information.…”

David, Goliath, and reverend Bayes: Prior beliefs about defendants' status in personal injury cases

“…For example, jurors are not able to restrict their inferences to legally relevant evidence, despite judicial instructions to do so. Just as people are unable to ignore discredited information in making personality judgements (Wyer and Budesheim, 1987;Wyer and Unverzagt, 1985) or revising social theories (Anderson, Lepper, and Ross, 1980), so mock jurors are unable to ignore evidence that has been ruled inadmissible (Carretta and Moreland, 1983;Sue, Smith, and Caldwell, 1973;Thompson, Fong, and Rosenhan, 1981;Wolf and Montgomery, 1977). As new information is presented, it is immediately processed into people's ongoing belief revisions, or schemata, which are then resistant to change and colour the evaluation of subsequent evidence and instructions (Wrightsman, 1991, ch.…”