Overlooking the incongruent: Categorization biases in the identification of political statements.

To explore factors affecting memory for statements expounding political positions, 2 experiments examined source attribution for 1-sentence political statements embedded in either congruent or incongruent contexts. In Exp I, 28 female undergraduates who were active in a campus feminist group and 26 who were not read essays by 4 writers of differing overall viewpoints on feminism; in Exp II, 32 undergraduates who were active in the anti-nuclear-power movement and 32 who were not read similar essays about nuclear power. Analysis revealed a pronounced "congruency bias"—both superior recognition memory and more accurate attribution to source for statements embodying a position consistent with the global position of the source. Among incongruent statements, however, there was significantly better source memory for statements that represented extreme, rather than moderate, departures from the overall position of the writer, an effect attributable in part to the greater salience of extremely incongruent items. There was also significantly better source attribution for statements made by writers whose global positions were relatively congenial to Ss and for statements embodying either minority positions or extreme versions of majority views. These effects were not moderated by either intensity of Ss' attitudes or instructions that specifically requested Ss to remember incongruent items. An extension of these studies that adjusted for response bias by transforming the source attribution dependent variable is appended. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)