Similarity to the self influences memory for social targets

ABSTRACT

The construct of the self is important in the domain of memory research. Recent work has shown that person memory is influenced by similarity of social targets to the self. The current experiments investigate self-similarity as defined by traits and political ideology to better understand how memory for social targets is organised. Across three experiments, participants formed positive or negative impressions based on each target’s picture, a trait-implying behavior (Experiments 1 & 2), and/or political ideology (conservative/liberal label in Experiment 2; political-ideological belief statements in Experiment 3) followed by a memory test. Results showed a self-similarity effect dependent on valence in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 or 3 when participants processed ideological information associated with targets. These results suggest that self-similarity has an effect on memory for social targets, but that ideological information disrupts self-focused processing of others, suggesting that ideological information also has a powerful influence on what people remember about others (i.e. social targets).

KEYWORDS:

• Impression memory
• impression formation
• self-similarity
• social cognition
• self-reference effect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Disclosure of interest

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Author note

We have no conflicts of interest to disclose. This study was not preregistered. Study materials and data are available upon request.

Notes

1 Although robust, there is some work that suggests the self-reference effect is dependent on the type of information to be learned (e.g., some work has not found the self-reference effect for common nouns; Maki & Maki & McCaul, 1985; Nairne et al., 2007; Nairne et al., 2008).

2 The first judgment was used to measure self-similarity. The second judgment about the importance of the trait was not the focus of our study, and thus will not be discussed further.

3 Because we defined ideology self-similarity as whether the participant and social targets shared the same ideology (either conservative or liberal), we could not run parallel analyses on these two participants, and thus excluded them from the analyses. Of the remaining participants, six identified as conservative and 15 identified as liberal.

4 Participants were asked what their political ideology was, and how strongly they identified with that ideology. The average strength of association with their political ideology was moderate (M = 2.95, SD = .86; on a scale of 1: not at all to 5: very strongly). Conservatives (M = 2.67, SD = .52) and liberals (M = 3.07, SD = .96) both identified moderately with their ideology.

5 Participants data was only used if they were conservative or liberal so that half of the trials/social targets were ideologically similar and half were ideologically dissimilar for each participant.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.