Person memory and judgment.

Two general types of information about a person are considered in this article: One pertains to specific behaviors a person had manifested, and the other refers to more abstract personality dispositions or behavioral tendencies. A theoretical model of person memory that incorporates both types of information is developed. The model accounts for a large number of factors that are known to affect the recall of social information, the making of interpersonal judgments, and the relation between what is recalled and the judgments that are made. A major strength of the model is its applicability to a wide range of person memory and judgment phenomena that are observed in several different experimental paradigms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Person memory and causal attributions.

Three experiments with 273 college students were conducted to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the well-established finding that initial impressions are resistant to incongruent (ICG) information and the finding that information ICG with an impression is particularly likely to be recalled. Using a procedure similar to that of R. Hastie and P. A. Kumar (1979), a situational or dispositional attribution was provided for a target item, which was either congruent (CG) or ICG with an initial impression. The ICG item was more likely than the CG item to be recalled only when attributed to dispositional causes (Exp I). The congruence of the target had greater impact on impressions when attributed to dispositional causes, particularly when Ss were given little other information about the target (Exps I and II). Exp III revealed that Ss preferred situational attributions for ICG items and dispositional attributions for CG. The authors conclude that Hastie and Kumar's findings may be limited to conditions in which situational attributions for TCG information are not provided. Possible mediators of the effects of causal attributions on recall, and the relation between recall and impressions are discussed. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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

In 3 experiments, a total of 96 undergraduates studied and recalled sentences describing behaviors while performing a laboratory impression-information 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 is 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. (56 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Person memory in intergroup contexts: Categorization versus individuation.

Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of perceiver group identity and expectancies on whether social information is organized at the level of the individual or the social category. In all 3 experiments, participants viewed a videotaped discussion among 6 people whose category identity was signified by sweatshirt color. In Experiment 1, performance on an identification test was affected by meaningfulness of the category distinction. Results of Experiment 2 indicated that intracategory confusions were higher under conditions of competitive interdependence between groups than under mere categorization or category salience conditions alone. Experiment 3 demonstrated that members of minority categories are individuated less than members of majority categories, except by members of the minority in-group. Results of the 3 experiments are discussed in relation to the concept of perceived "entitativity" of social categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Destination memory impairment in older people.

Older adults are assumed to have poor destination memory—knowing to whom they tell particular information—and anecdotes about them repeating stories to the same people are cited as informal evidence for this claim. Experiment 1 assessed young and older adults' destination memory by having participants tell facts (e.g., “A dime has 118 ridges around its edge”) to pictures of famous people (e.g., Oprah Winfrey). Surprise recognition memory tests, which also assessed confidence, revealed that older adults, compared to young adults, were disproportionately impaired on destination memory relative to spared memory for the individual components (i.e., facts, faces) of the episode. Older adults also were more confident that they had not told a fact to a particular person when they actually had (i.e., a miss); this presumably causes them to repeat information more often than young adults. When the direction of information transfer was reversed in Experiment 2, such that the famous people shared information with the participants (i.e., a source memory experiment), age-related memory differences disappeared. In contrast to the destination memory experiment, older adults in the source memory experiment were more confident than young adults that someone had shared a fact with them when a different person actually had shared the fact (i.e., a false alarm). Overall, accuracy and confidence jointly influence age-related changes to destination memory, a fundamental component of successful communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cross-cultural differences in memory: The role of culture-based stereotypes about aging.

The extent to which cultural stereotypes about aging contribute to age differences in memory performance is investigated by comparing younger and older Anglophone Canadians to demographically matched Chinese Canadians, who tend to hold more positive views of aging. Four memory tests were administered. In contrast to B. Levy and E. Langer's (1994) findings, younger adults in both cultural groups outperformed their older comparison group on all memory tests. For 2 tests, which made use of visual stimuli resembling ideographic characters in written Chinese, the older Chinese Canadians approached, but did not reach, the performance achieved by their younger counterparts, as well as outperformed the older Anglophone Canadians. However, on the other two tests, which assess memory for complex figures and abstract designs, no differences were observed between the older Chinese and Anglophone Canadians. Path analysis results suggest that this pattern of findings is not easily attributed to a wholly culturally based account of age differences in memory performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related variation in the influences of aging stereotypes on memory in adulthood.

Adults 24-86 years of age read positive or negative information about aging and memory prior to a memory test. The impact of this information on recall performance varied with age. Performance in the youngest and oldest participants was minimally affected by stereotype activation. Adults in their 60s exhibited weak effects consistent with the operation of stereotype threat, whereas middle-age adults exhibited a contrast effect in memory performance, suggestive of stereotype lift. Beliefs about aging and memory were also affected by stereotypic information, and older adults' changed beliefs were more important in predicting performance than was exposure to stereotype-based information alone. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Direction-of-knobturn stereotypes.

College students received 8 instructions for changing brightness of a light by turning a knob. Either direction of turn accomplished the effect requested. Clockwise-to-increase turns were made by 73.3% of the Ss. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of sex stereotypes on children's exploration and memory: A competence versus performance distinction.

25 girls and 31 boys (aged 4–9 yrs) were presented with novel objects in 3 sex-labeled boxes and were given 6 min to explore the objects. Memory for information about the objects was tested 1 wk later. Results show that Ss tactually explored novel objects labeled for their own sex more than similar objects labeled for the other sex and remembered more detailed information about own-sex than other-sex objects. Furthermore, regardless of labeling condition, Ss recalled the sex-typed label applied by the experimenter to each object. As expected from the C. L. Martin and C. F. Halverson, Jr. (see record 1982-05576-001) schematic processing model, an incentive to remember did not improve recall in any labeling condition. The sex-typed labeling effects on exploration occurred primarily among the older children, whereas the effects on recall appeared among the younger and older boys and the younger girls. The results suggest that sex stereotypes restrict children's behavior by limiting their competence rather than their performance. Findings are discussed in relation to an earlier study by the 1st author and R. C. Endsley (see record 1983-32397-001). (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex-role stereotypes for internal-external control and interpersonal trust.

Undergraduates completed Rotter's Internal-External Control Scale and the Interpersonal Trust Scale and then retook the tests as if they were "supermale" and "superfemale" (i.e., extremely masculine and feminine). Sex-role stereotypes of males as more internal and less trusting were found to exist for both sexes, but Ss' own scores diverged considerably from their same-sex stereotypes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging free from negative stereotypes: Successful memory in China among the American deaf.

This study explores whether negative stereotypes about aging contribute to memory loss in old age. The research participants consisted of old and young Chinese hearing, American Deaf, and American hearing individuals. Members of the mainland Chinese and the American Deaf cultures were recruited on the basis of the belief that they would be less likely than hearing Americans to be exposed to and accept negative stereotypes about aging. The expected results were (1) an interaction in which the 3 groups of younger Ss would perform similarly on the memory tasks, whereas the older Deaf and older Chinese participants would outperform the older American hearing group and (2) a positive correlation between view toward aging and memory performance among the old Ss. The data supported both hypotheses. The results suggest that cultural beliefs about aging play a role in determining the degree of memory loss people experience in old age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex stereotypes and social judgment.

Tested the assumption that sexual stereotypic beliefs affect the judgments of individuals in an experiment with 98 male and 97 female undergraduates. No evidence was found for effects of stereotypes on Ss' judgments about a target individual. Instead, Ss judgments were strongly influenced by behavioral information about the target. To explain these results, it is noted that the predicted effects of social stereotypes on judgments conform to Bayes' theorem for the normative use of prior probabilities in judgment tasks, inasmuch as stereotypic beliefs may be regarded as intuitive estimates for the probabilities of traits in social groups. Research in the psychology of prediction has demonstrated that people often neglect prior probabilities when making predictions about people, especially when they have individuating information about the person that is subjectively diagnostic of the criterion. An implication of this research is that a minimal amount of subjectively diagnostic target case information should be sufficient to eradicate effects of stereotypes on judgments. Results of a 2nd experiment with 75 female and 55 male undergraduates support this argument. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development and mental representation of stereotypes.

A mixed model of stereotype representation was tested. Experiment 1 examined the development of stereotypes about novel groups. Results showed that, at low levels of experience, stereotypic group knowledge is derived from information about particular group exemplars. However, as experience increases, an abstract group stereotype is formed that is stored and retrieved independently of the exemplars on which it was based. Results of Experiment 2 suggest that preexisting stereotypes about well-known groups are represented as abstract structures in memory. These results indicate that stereotypical knowledge is most likely to be exemplar-based in the absence of abstract stereotypes. The implications of these findings for other aspects of stereotyping and social perception are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imagining stereotypes away: The moderation of implicit stereotypes through mental imagery.

Research on implicit stereotypes has raised important questions about an individual's ability to moderate and control stereotypic responses. With few strategies shown to be effective in moderating implicit effects, the present research investigates a new strategy based on focused mental imagery. Across 5 experiments, participants who engaged in counterstereotypic mental imagery produced substantially weaker implicit stereotypes compared with participants who engaged in neutral, stereotypic, or no mental imagery. This reduction was demonstrated with a variety of measures, eliminating explanations based on response suppression or shifts in response criterion. Instead, the results suggest that implicit stereotypes are malleable, and that controlled processes, such as mental imagery, may influence the stereotyping process at its early as well as later stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)