False Memories Of Attitude-Relevant Actions

Abstract

Abstract When people assess their attitudes, they rely on salient memories of their own attitude-relevant actions. Sometimes, however, people remember taking actions that they only imagined. Thus attitude reports might be influenced by false or unlikely memories. Participants in two experiments reported their attitudes and chose from a list all the attitude-relevant actions they had ever taken toward gay men. One week later, in an “unrelated” experiment, they wrote fictitious scenarios in which they performed one of these actions and three of the actions that they had earlier denied. One week after that, they reported their attitudes and chose from the action list again. The more of the fictitious actions participants later remembered, the more they changed their reported attitudes in the direction of those actions. Attitude change occurred only for the target group, and only when participants imagined themselves (not another person) performing the actions. Possible cognitive mechanisms and implications f...