Person memory: Personality traits as organizing principles in memory for behaviors.

Abstract

Subjects studied and recalled sentences describing behaviors while performing a laboratory impression-formation task. Recall was high for behaviors that were incongruent with a personality-trait impression for a character, whereas recall was much lower for behaviors that were congruent or neutral with reference to the impression. Set size, the number of congruent and incongruent behaviors attributed to the character, was shown to be a major determinant of this result. The smaller the size of the incongruent set, the higher the probability of recalling an item from the set. There was no tendency for behaviors to cluster by trait category in recall output protocols. This result was interpreted as evidence that a simple analogy to hierarchical noun categories, studied in many verbal learning experiments on organization of memory, did not apply to the present results. Three theoretical analyses-an associative network model, a depth-of-processing model, and a schema model-are reviewed in light of these results.Psychologists have been interested for a long time in the effects of abstract organizing principles on memory. Sir Frederic Bartlett's (1932) schema theory is one of the earliest efforts to explicate the relations between an abstract structure and the recall of specific facts. Bartlett proposed that memory is not primarily or literally reduplicative or reproductive. Rather, he argued that perceived events are assimilated to mental schemata that have been formed by similar events experienced in the past. Bartlett's classic treatise on remembering is replete with examples of phenomena that he believed evidenced the workings of these schemata.Researchers have studied the manner in

Recall of congruent information in the self-reference task

“…This type of response is a counterexample negative response . This distinction is similar to the distinction made by Hastie and Kumar (1979) between neutral and incongruent trait adjectives . More n.o-example negative (neutral) responses than counterexample negative (incongruent) responses may have occurred in the self condition than i~the~ouse condition.…”

“…that the self-reference effect is independent of the selfdescriptiveness of the target traits. Furthermore, some studies that investigated person stereotypes found that information not congruent with the stereotype is recalled better than is information congruent to it (Hastie & Kumar, 1979;Srull , 1981). One purpose of the experiment described here is to test the congruent-information hypothesis.…”

“…Yet the learner may attend to noncongruent information, that is , information not typical of the knowledge structure that guides processing, more closely than to congruent information . For example, Hastie and Kumar (1979) found that information atypical of an activated person stereotype was recalled better than was typical information. Similarly, using a test of immediate recaII, Graesser et aI.…”

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

“…When expectations about others are violated, the social impressions of them need to be updated (e.g., Hamilton, Driscoll, & Worth, 1989;Hastie & Kumar, 1979;Reeder & Coovert, 1986). In these situations, individuals usually take longer to integrate information about others that contradicts rather than matches their initial impressions (Reeder & Coovert, 1986).…”

Memory and judgment bias in retrospective evaluations

“…Information that is incongruent with an initial judgment (i.e., a sort of "first impression" of the to-be-evaluated stimuli) is better remembered than congruent information. In a study by Hastie and Kumar (1979), participants were presented with behaviour descriptions about a hypothetical character; later, they were asked to judge her personality. During a following memory test phase, the behaviours that were incongruent with the personality appraisal were better remembered.…”