False memories and impressions of personality

Abstract

We extended the false memories paradigm to the study of impressions formation. Traits most commonly used in describing person-targets were employed to identify the four clusters underlying the implicit theory of personality semantic structure (intellectual positive and negative; social positive and negative). Finally, we developed lists including semantic neighbors of the traits closest to the clusters’ centroid and athematic (non-trait) words. Participants were presented with these lists and instructed to either form an impression of a person described by those words or simply to memorize them. Impression formation relative to memory participants produced higher levels of false memories of lures corresponding to the same cluster of the list traits and the reverse pattern was found for a-thematic words. Parallel results from a gist test suggest that forming impressions implies the activation of a specialized associative memory structure underlying the referred bi-dimensional implicit theory of personality (Rosenberg, Nelson, & Vivekananthan, 1968).