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Disposition-based categories: Structure and salience effects on memory
JOURNAL
OF RESEARCH
IN PERSONALITY
Disposition-Based
18,
179-194
(1984)
Categories: Structure and Salience Effects on Memory
HARVEY H. C. MARMUREK University
of Guelph
Two experiments investigated whether disposition-based categories inthtence the retrieval of behaviors related or unrelated to those categories. In Experiment 1, subjects studied a set of behaviors in order to form an impression of a target person. Impression ratings indicated which category had been activated. In an unexpected recognition test, accuracy was better for category-inconsistent information than for category-consistent behaviors. That result suggested that the structure of disposition-based categories includes qualitatively different representations of consistent and inconsistent acts related to the category. In Experiment 2, subjects rated behaviors with reference to a relevant or irrelevant disposition category. In an unexpected recall test, an advantage for category-inconsistent behaviors was found only when the behaviors had been studied from the perspective of the relevant category. It was concluded that categories are not activated spontaneously by the behaviors, and that acts judged as irrelevant are not represented in a form analogous to the representation of category-inconsistent behaviors.
Studies of person perception have recently begun to focus on the structure of mental representations of personality and how that structure influences impression formation and memory for behaviors of others (Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Wyer & Gordon, 1982). Buss and Craik (1980) proposed that the representation of a disposition is based on the frequency of a class of acts relative to the normative frequency. That is, a person would be categorized as “friendly” if that person performed a number of friendly behaviors which exceeded the norm for a given time period. The structure of a dispositional category was assumed to be similar to that for natural categories (Rosch, 1975) in that individual instances of a behavior category would vary in typicality. Hampson (1982) has also argued that trait categories refer to a constellation of actions. Both Buss and Craik (1980) and Hampson (1982) claim that one of the functions of The author gratefully acknowledges John Cassidy for his programming assistance and Lori Wilson for her assistance in data collection. Requests for reprints should be sent to Harvey H. C. Marmurek, Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario NlG 2W1, Canada. 179 0092-6X6/84
$3.00
Copyright 0 1984 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form resewed.
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the personality category is to enable the prediction of what future behaviors a person is likely to perform in that acts within a category tend to be associated more strongly than acts between categories. Recent research has demonstrated that expectations based on cognitive dispositional categories function to organize the perception and retention of behavioral information (Hastie & Kumar, 1979; Hemsley & Marmurek, 1982; Srull, 1981). Judd and Kulik (1980) claimed that those expectations activate schemata or categories of behaviors which determine the type of information that a perceiver is prepared to encounter. In a test of the effects of expectations based on bipolar personality characteristics, Hastie and Kumar (1979) showed that information inconsistent with the expectations was recalled better than consistent information. Hemsley and Marmurek (1982) replicated that outcome for conditions where a high percentage of the test information was consistent with the expectations. When the bulk of behaviors was inconsistent with the expectation-inducing information, however, the information consistent with that expectation gained a recall advantage. One hypothesis which accommodates that interaction is that a new category was instantiated as information inconsistent with a previously active category accumulated to a point where the earlier expectations were no longer tenable. Support for that hypothesis was found in the processing times and impression ratings collected by Hemsley and Marmurek (1982). Final impressions were determined by the size of a given set of behaviors regardless of whether those behaviors conformed to earlier expectations, and the duration of studying behaviors in a self-paced task was inversely related to consistency with momentary expectations. The latter finding is consistent with the suggestion made by Cantor and Mischel (1979) that the encoding of a set of inconsistent behaviors attributed to a person requires more effort than the encoding of a consistent set of behaviors. Although Buss and Craik (1980) and Hampson (1982) have provided descriptions of the way behaviors may be organized in the representation of a dispositional category, those descriptions do not include a mechanism which can account for the recall advantage for inconsistent behaviors. Models of information processing that can account for that effect have been proposed by Smith and Graesser (1981) and by Srull (1981). Although both models espouse an associative representation of the behaviors in categories, they differ in their assumptions about the interrelationships among the items in the associative network. According to Smith and Graesser (1981), the information in a category or schema is distinguished in terms of how typical the instances are of the category. When a typical instance is encountered, a general activation of the category results in the storage of a pointer indicating which category was activated. Presumably, all that is required to generate highly typical events is some knowledge that the general category to which they conform has been
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activated. The encoding of atypical events, however, consists of separate distinct tags for each presented event. It is the distinctiveness of the atypical event representations which affords a retrieval advantage in recall. The lack of distinctiveness among the typical events leads to intrusion of information consistent with the category but which had not been presented (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). In the model proposed by Srull (1981), events in a category are all directly linked to the general category representation. Additional links are formed to connect inconsistent items directly to one another, and to consistent items. That is, only items consistent with the category are not directly linked to one another. The extra links which connect the inconsistent items to each other and to the consistent items provide extra retrieval routes for those items and account for the recall superiority of the inconsistent information. Although the models converge in their predictions regarding recall of inconsistent information, they differ in their predictions of recognition accuracy. Srull (1981) reasoned from a “generation-recognition” theory of free recall that recognition does not entail retrieval; therefore, in recognition tests, no inconsistent item superiority effect should obtain since the extra retrieval routes favoring the inconsistent items should play no role in a recognition task. Srull (1981) included a recognition test in his studies and found no significant difference in the recognition of consistent and inconsistent information. However, Smith and Graesser (1981) did find that inconsistent information was recognized more accurately than consistent information. They concluded that the distinct tags for the inconsistent items mediated both recall and recognition; that is, as advocated by Mandler (1980), recognition retrieval mechanisms were proposed to overlap with those of recall. A possible source of the discrepant recognition effects found in those studies is the effect of sequential testing in recall and recognition. Cooper and Monk (1976) showed that a recall trial leads to learning which transfers to a delayed recognition test. In the Srull study, subjects were first given a recall test on the information studied, and about 12 min later they were given a recognition test on the same information. That sequence of testing may have led to levels of recognition which obscured differences in accessibility to consistent and inconsistent types of category information. In the Smith and Graesser studies, recall and recognition were tested for distinct sets of category behavior so that no specific transfer effects could occur from recall to recognition. Experiment 1 was designed to test the two models of category representation. Recognition differences between category-consistent and category-inconsistent information were studied under conditions similar to those studied by Srull (1981), but unconfounded by prior recall testing. Evidence of an advantage for the
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inconsistent information would support the model proposed by Smith and Graesser (1981). In addition to measures of recognition accuracy, measures of recognition latency were also collected. The purpose of including latency measures was to determine whether subjects did organize the information into a categorical set. Integration of information into an associative category may be indexed by the absence of afun effect (Reder & Anderson, 1980), where a fan effect refers to an increase in recognition latencies as the number of events relating to a given topic increases. The fan effect has been interpreted as indicating that each event is retrieved independently. When the events are organized around a theme, the fan effect will not be found if decisions are made with reference to the common organizing theme. To determine whether a category was activated by the information presented, the number of behaviors relevant to prior expectations was manipulated and the presence of a fan effect was probed. EXPERIMENT
1
Method Subjects. The subjects were 72 (45 females) undergraduates at the University of Guelph who were tested individually and were paid $4 for their participation. All subjects were tested by a 22-year-old female psychology major. Procedure and list construction. The study generally followed the “impression set” conditions used by Srull (1981) since those conditions are more sensitive to manipulations of type of behaviors than are conditions in which subjects expect a memory test (Wyer & Gordon, 1982). Subjects were told that the study was concerned with how people form an impression of others who have carried out certain acts. To induce an initial expectation on the part of the subjects, subjects read a list of five trait adjectives selected from Anderson (1968). The adjectives conformed to the following “polar opposite” personalities: intelligentunintelligent; honest-liar; and friendly-hostile. For example, the adjectives used to induce the expectation of an intelligent person were: intelligent, knowledgeable, skillful, clever, and scientific. The adjectives were shown simultaneously for 10 s on a 9-in. diagonal Electrohome monitor controlled by an Apple II+ microcomputer. Once presentation of the adjectives had terminated, the presentation of a set of behaviors began. The behaviors were presented as sentences, one at a time, for 5 s each. The sentences, which showed at least 90% agreement by 50 subjects who rated them in a pretest, were of three types: (1) sentences conforming to the expectation induced by the adjective set were “consistent” types; (2) sentences which induced an impression on the opposite pole of the personality dimension induced by the adjective set were “inconsistent” types; (3) sentences designed to induce a pole on one of the other two dimension were “irrelevant” types. Each adjective set had a pool of 12 sentences consistent with it, and these were sampled as follows in constructing the behavior lists. Each behavior list contained 22 sentences and formed one of three list types defined by whether the consistent or inconsistent sentences were greater in number. In a “consistent” list, there were 8 consistent sentences, 4 inconsistent sentences, and 10 irrelevant sentences. In an “inconsistent” list, there were 4 consistent sentences, 8 inconsistent sentences, and 10 irrelevant sentences. In an “equal” list, there were 8 consistent, 8 inconsistent, and 6 irrelevant sentences. For each list type, each pole of the personality dimensions was tested with four subjects who each received a different random sampling of sentences. Subjects who were tested with “consistent” and “inconsistent” list types were yoked so that a
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given pair of subjects was presented identical lists, but had studied opposing adjective sets. Thus, across all lists, the yoking procedure ensured that while initial expectancy was varied, the specific items tested for each expectancy were held constant. Similarly, for the “equal” condition, subjects were yoked so that for a given list, each of a pair of subjects saw opposing adjective sets. After the final sentence in a behavior list had been presented, subjects rated the fictional character’s personality on six bipolar 9-point scales, one of which corresponded to the dimension conveyed by the trait adjective set. A 2-min interval followed during which subjects assisted in scoring the ratings and discussed whether they had any difficulty in assigning values on the scales. No subject reported any diiculty in completing the personality scales. This was followed by an unexpected recognition test in which behavior sentences were shown on the screen, one at a time. Subjects pressed a response button to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether or not the sentence had been present in the earlier behavior set. The response and its latency were stored by a machine language clock program which was accurate within the range of + 1 ms. There were 24 sentences in the recognition test, of which 12 were old and 12 were new. For each sentence type there were four old and four new sentences; the old sentences were randomly selected from the behavior list with the restriction that no sentences had appeared in the first three or last three positions in the list. The new consistent and inconsistent sentences were selected randomly from the remaining eight sentences in the corresponding pool, and the irrelevant sentences were selected randomly from among the presented and nonpresented items. The order of items in the recognition test was determined randomly for each pair of yoked subjects. Design. The experimental design was a 3 x 3 mixed factorial with List Type (consistent, inconsistent, equal) tested between subjects and Sentence Type (consistent, inconsistent, irrelevant) tested within subjects. Subjects were assigned to the List Type conditions in a block randomized fashion.
Results The pattern for all the significant effects was similar for each of the personality dimensions tested and the analyses are reported for data pooled across the three bipolar personality dimensions. The level of statistical significance was set at .05 for all analytical comparisons. Personality ratings. These ratings were obtained as a manipulation check to determine whether the final impression of the fictional character was consistent with the initial adjective set. The impression rating on the relevant personality dimension was taken on a scale of 1 to 9 from the positive pole to the negative pole. Since the pole activated by the adjective list was counterbalanced across subjects, the following procedure was used to obtain a single index of rating consistency across all subjects. For the positive adjective sets, the actual rating given by the subject was used, and for the negative adjective sets, the value of the rating was subtracted from 10. For example, if a subject had seen the “unintelligent” adjective set and then rated the person a 9 on the intelligentunintelligent scale, the value assigned to that subject was 1. This procedure yielded a value equivalent to that for a subject who had seen the “intelligent” set and had rated the person a 1. Thus, across all subjects, the lower the value on the rating test, the more consistent was the rating with the adjective set which had been presented prior to the behaviors.
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The mean ratings were submitted to a one-way analysis of variance which showed that the List Type effect was significant, F(2, 69) = 3.43, MS, = 3.68. A Newman-Keuls test of the list means showed that ratings in the Consistent condition (M = 3.5) were significantly lower than the ratings in the Inconsistent (M = 5.1) and Equal (M = 4.4) conditions. That is, when the behaviors consistent with the adjective set outnumbered the inconsistent behaviors, the final impression of the fictional character was more likely to match the initial impression conveyed by the adjectives. The nonextreme values of the mean ratings indicate the moderating influence of the irrelevant behaviors. Recognition accuracy. The mean hit and false alarm rates on the recognition test are displayed in Table 1. A 3 x 3 mixed analysis of variance on the scores corrected for guessing, (Hit Rate - False Alarm Rate)/( 1 - False Alarm Rate), showed that only the interaction effect was significant, F(4, 138) = 3.72, MS, = .03. For the Consistent list condition, recognition was better for the Inconsistent sentences than for the Consistent sentences, whereas in the other two list conditions the direction was reversed. This pattern replicates the recall results of Hemsley and Marmurek (1982). The difference between Consistent and Inconsistent sentences was statistically significant for only Consistent and Inconsistent lists. Irrelevant behaviors were recognized significantly better in the Consistent and Inconsistent lists than in the Equal list. Recognition latency. The mean correct recognition latencies are shown in Table 1. A 3 x 3 mixed analysis of variance of those means yielded only a significant Sentence Type effect, F(2, 138) = 7.08, MS, = 43421. Latencies were longest for Irrelevant sentences, and the other types of sentences did not differ. The absence of a significant List effect shows TABLE RECOGNITION
PERFORMANCE:
MEAN
1
PROPORTION OF HITS AND FALSE ALARMS AND MEAN CORRECT LATENCIES
List type Sentence type Consistent
Measure
Consistent
Inconsistent
Equal
PO-W
.85 .I1 1257
.90 .I2 1286
.88 .09 1246
.94 1281
.79 .08 1262
.83 .05 1240
20 .Ol 1357
.93 .02 1408
.82 .03 1362
p(F.A.)
Latency (ms) Inconsistent
POW p(F.A.)
Latency (ms) Irrelevant
HIit) p(F.A.1
Latency (ms)
.09
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that latency was not affected by the number of sentences of a given type in a list; that is, there was no significant fan effect. The increase in latency averaged 106 ms across the list conditions where the Irrelevant sentences made up the ‘largest set, and the increase was 119 ms when the Irrelevant sentences made up the smallest set (Equal list). Although it is not customary to make strong inferences from null effects, the magnitude of the Sentence Type effect indicates that the null effect was not due to a lack of power in the present design. Rather, the failure to find a significant List effect may be viewed as replicating previous findings of retrieval driven by an organized category (Reder & Anderson, 1980). Discussion The major purpose of the first experiment was to test between two models of the associative structure of a personality category. Activation of a category was induced by a set of trait adjectives and a list of behaviors varying in congruence with that set of adjectives. Final impression ratings indicated that behaviors had a greater influence on the activation of a personality category than did the adjective set; that is, the final impression was similar to the disposition characteristic of the adjective set only when the majority of behaviors in the list were consistent with that disposition. Recognition of behaviors related to the final impression was an inverse function of that relationship; behaviors inconsistent with the final impression were recognized better than behaviors consistent with the impression. That outcome replicates the effects found by Smith and Graesser (1981), but does not support the results of Srull (1981) whose recognition data may have been confounded by an earlier recall test. Recognition of the Irrelevant sentences in the Consistent and Inconsistent lists mirrored that of the sentences inconsistent with the final impression, a result which indicates that those behaviors were encoded as distinct from behaviors typical of the category. Recognition did not differ among sentence types in the Equal condition and this may indicate that no single personality category guided recognition in that condition; however, the latency pattern in the Equal condition was similar to that in the other List Type conditions in that Irrelevant acts were recognized most slowly. Overall, the recognition data are more consistent with the model of category structure proposed by Smith and Graesser (1981) than they are with that posited by Srull (1981). Information inconsistent with or irrelevant to a final impression was recognized more accurately than behaviors consistent with that impression. Srull, who had failed to find recognition differences in his study, concluded that the organizational structure of the behaviors provides retrieval pathways which are not used in a recognition task. If recognition does minimize retrieval (see Smith & Graesser, 1981; and Mandler, 1980, for opposing viewpoints) and relies on dis-
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crimination, then according to Srull’s model consistent acts should be better recognized since fewer associative links emanate from them. The present finding of superior recognition of inconsistent behaviors is incompatible with that model, but supports the Smith and Graesser (1981) model which distinguishes between the activation of a general category of acts typical of a disposition and specific representations for acts atypical of that category. The recognition latency results indicate that categories did guide retrieval of the behavior since no fan effect was found. The more accurate recognition of the inconsistent and irrelevant behaviors (in the Consistent and Inconsistent list type conditions) may be attributed to their distinctive representations which are not embedded within the general category. Extra processing times for those behaviors (Hemsley & Marmurek, 1982) would be required to set up specific representations which differ from the representation of the consistent behaviors. That is, contrary to the claim made by Srull (1981), the distinction between the representations of behaviors consistent with or inconsistent with an activated dispositional category is qualitative rather than quantitative. An apparently problematic outcome from Experiment 1 is that the latency pattern of Irrelevant behaviors is similar across list types (slowest recognition time), while the recognition accuracy patterns are different. Latency of recognition may be determined by the degree to which the act in question is related to an activated category. That is, a first step in a recognition judgment may involve a determination of whether the test item is at all related to an activated category (cf. Reder & Anderson, 1980). Irrelevant behaviors would fail at this stage in all lists and then a detailed, time-consuming search of the unrelated items would follow. Recognition accuracy, however, might depend on the activation of a single personality category from which typicality of individual acts can be guaged. Single categories would be established only for the Consistent and Inconsistent lists. No advantage for the Irrelevant behaviors would occur in the Equal list condition since no single category was available in that condition to guide retrieval. These admittedly ad hoc processing assumptions imply that the fate of the irrelevant behaviors depends on whether attention is focused on a single category which acts to guide retrieval. EXPERIMENT
2
The purpose of Experiment 2 was to determine whether a personality category must be actively attended to in order for selective memory effects to occur. Hamilton, Katz, and Lierer (1980) found that study instructions affected behavior recall under conditions where prior expectations were not manipulated. That finding suggests that dispositional categories may be activated spontaneously. However, even in that case, it may be that the impact of those categories on the retrieval of behaviors depends upon the specific categories activated. Forgas (1983) determined
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how strongly subjects thought they would react to 16 personality prototypes, and examined recall of behaviors related to the most highly salient and least salient prototypes. Information inconsistent with the prototype was recalled better than consistent behavior only if the prototype had been rated as low in salience. For highly salient targets, consistent behaviors were recalled better. The stimulus materials in the Forgas (1983) study were categorically dissimilar to those used in studies showing a general superiority of inconsistent behavior recall and this difference suggests that direct comparisons with those studies may be invalid. For example, Forgas (1983) used college student prototypes (e.g., student radicals as highly salient; sporty types as low in salience) and the information describing those prototypes included a combination of adjectives and behaviors. Studies which find better recall of inconsistent information tend to use dispositional or trait categories which are exemplified by specific behaviors (e.g., Hastie & Kumar, 1979), and it is difficult to understand why those categories should be low in salience. Furthermore, it is not clear whether categories based on personality types are structurally equivalent to categories based on traits (Hampson, 1982). The important implication of the Forgas (1983) study, however, is that the salience of a personality category may govern how information related to that category is processed. Hamilton and Fallot (1974) have shown that the influence of inconsistent information on a personality impression varies with the salience of that information. Following from the work of Rosenberg, Nelson, and Vivekanathan (1968), who used multidimensional scaling techniques to determine implicit personality structures, Hamilton and Fallot (1974) argued that knowledge of a person’s social habits were not predictive of that person’s intellectual qualities, and vice versa. Subjects were asked to make judgments of how much they liked or respected a person about whom they had learned four traits, one of which was inconsistent with the others. The liking judgments were affected more by social information, and the respect judgments were influenced more strongly by the intellectual traits. Hamilton and Fallot (1974) concluded that the salience of the traits varied with the type of judgment required. In Experiment 2 the salience of a category for a set of behaviors was manipulated by asking subjects to process behaviors relative to a certain “cognitive set.” Wyer, Srull, Gordon, and Hartwick (1982) showed that attention to details in a prose passage varied with the perspective subjects were asked to take. That is, expectations for a certain category of information improved incidental recall of information related to that category. In Experiment 2, subjects rated the likelihood that a person of a particular disposition would carry out each of a set of behaviors, and groups of subjects differed in terms of whether the disposition of reference was directly related to the behaviors or not. If category salience must be high in order for the category to influence retrieval of behaviors, then different patterns of recall should be found for the predictive and
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nonpredictive reference dispositions. Specifically, recall of inconsistent behaviors should be higher than that for consistent behaviors when the focal disposition is predictive of the behaviors in the list, but not when it is nonpredictive. Method Subjects. The subjects were 80 (50 females) introductory psychology students at the University of Guelph and each received $4 for their participation. Procedure and list construction. The subjects were told that the purpose of the study was to obtain measures of how typical certain behaviors were of people characterized by different personality traits. Two lists of 24 behaviors were generated from the behavior statements used in Experiment 1. The Intelligent Majority list was comprised of 12 intelligent behaviors, 4 unintelligent behaviors, and 8 behaviors from the honest-liar dimension (4 from each pole). The Intelligent Minority list was made up of 4 intelligent behaviors, 12 unintelligent behaviors, and the 8 honest-liar sentences. Subjects were asked to rate each behavior on a scale of 1 to 9 where the numbers referred to how likely the subject thought a target person was to carry out the behavior. Low values indicated a high likelihood. There were four groups of subjects, with 20 per group, and the groups differed in terms of the list they studied and the reference disposition on which the likelihood ratings were based. Intelligent-focus subjects rated each behavior in terms of how likely it was that an intelligent person would perform it. There were two Intelligent-focus groups, and each carried out the ratings for a different list type (Intelligent Majority or Intelligent Minority). Since most of the behaviors in the list were relevant to the intelligent dimension, the social dimension was used to form a nonsalient condition (Rosenberg et al., 1968). Sociable-focus subjects rated each behavior in terms of how likely it was that a sociable person would perform it. There were two Sociable-focus groups, and each completed the ratings for a different list type. Subjects in the Intelligent-focus and Sociable-focus groups were yoked so that a pair of subjects was presented with the identical list. For each pair of subjects, the order and selection of items was random with the exception that all 12 available items for the majority set were used where appropriate. Behaviors were presented on the Electrohome monitor controlled by the Apple II+ microcomputer. The rate of presentation was 5 s per behavior during which time subjects made their likelihood ratings by pressing a button on a keypad on which were buttons corresponding to the numbers 1 through 9. The responses were recorded by the computer. After the last sentence had been rated, subjects were asked to indicate their impression of a person who would perform the acts they had rated. The impression ratings were taken on three personality scales: honest, intelligent, sociable. Subjects circled a number from 1 to 9 where high values indicated that the subject thought the person whose behaviors they had rated was characterized by the personality disposition in question. The experimenter discussed the ratings with the subject for about 2 min, and then asked the subject to recall as many behaviors as possible. Five minutes were allowed for the free recall task. Design. The study was designed as a 2 (Focus Disposition: intelligent or sociable) x 2 (List: intelligent majority or intelligent minority) factorial with 4 independent groups. Crossed with those factors was a repeated measures factor which differed depending on the dependent variable. For likelihood ratings and recall, the within-subjects variable was Behavior Type (intelligent, unintelligent, and neutral). For the impression ratings, the repeated measures factor was Trait Scale (honest, intelligent, and sociable).
Results Behavior likelihood ratings. The mean ratings of the likelihood that the focal person would perform a behavior are shown in Table 2. A
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TABLE 2 MEAN BEHAVIOR LIKELIHOOD RATINGS“ Behavior type List type
Disposition focus
Intelligent
Unintelligent
Neutral
Intelligent majority
Intelligent Sociable
2.8 4.0
6.1 4.6
4.2 4.1
Intelligent minority
Intelligent Sociable
3.8 4.4
6.3 4.1
4.2 4.8
a Lower values indicate greater likelihood judgments.
2 x 2 x 3 mixed analysis of variance showed that the ratings were significantly lower for the Intelligent Majority list (M = 4.3) than for the Intelligent Minority list (M = 4.7), F(1, 76) = 5.26, MS, = 1.72 and that the ratings differed across behavior types, F(2, 152) = 35.92, MS, = 2.09. The List Type x Behavior Type interaction approached significance, F(2, 152) = 2.47, MS, = 2.09, p < .09 and reflected the tendency for differences among behavior ratings to be greater in the Intelligent Majority list than in the Intelligent Minority list. The most important result of the behavior likelihood analysis was the significant Disposition Focus x Behavior interaction, F(2, 152) = 10.83, MS, = 2.09. That interaction showed that subjects rated Intelligent behaviors as most likely to be performed when the focal disposition was “intelligent.” When the focal disposition was “sociable,” the ratings did not differ across behavior types. In general, these results show that the reference disposition controlled how the behaviors were interpreted. Impression ratings. The mean impression ratings for each trait are shown in Table 3. A 2 x 2 x 3 mixed analysis of variance showed that the Trait Scale effect was significant, F(2, 152) = 6.27, MS, = 1.01 and TABLE 3 MEAN IMPRESSIONRATINGS’ Trait scale List type
Disposition
focus
Intelligent
Honest
Sociable
Intelligent majority
Intelligent Sociable
7.2 5.7
5.4 5.6
4.9 6.6
Intelligent minority
Intelligent Sociable
5.4 5.6
5.9 5.6
5.4 6.2
a Higher values indicate stronger impressions that the target person was characterized by the trait.
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entered into significant interactions with both between subject variables. For the Focus Disposition x Scale interaction, F(2, 152) = 25.8, MS, = 1.01, and for the Sentence Set x Scale interaction, F(2, 152) = 10.1, MS, = 1.01. The 3-way interaction was also significant, F(2, 152) = 4.12, MS, = 1.Ol, and that interaction resulted from the different patterns of impression ratings between the Intelligent Majority and Intelligent Minority conditions. Newman-Keuls tests showed that in the Intelligent Majority condition, subjects rated the focal person most highly on the “intelligent” scale when the reference disposition had been “intelligent” but in the Intelligent Minority condition no differences were found in the impression ratings for the “intelligent” focal person. However, in both the Intelligent Majority and Intelligent Minority conditions, ratings were highest on the “sociable” scale when the referent disposition was “sociable.” That is, the inthtence of the behaviors on the final impressions was overridden by the focal disposition. For example, a large number of intelligent behaviors were more likely to determine the impression of intelligence when the person forming the impression had studied those behaviors with an “intelligent” focus; yet with a “sociable” focus, that same set of behaviors led to a stronger impression for the sociable trait. Behavior recall. The mean proportion of behaviors recalled is shown in Table 4 for each type of behavior. A 2 x 2 x 3 mixed analysis of variance showed that all effects involving the Behavior Type factor were significant. The main effect, F(2, 152) = 16.66, MS, = .03 showed that the highest proportion of recall occurred for Unintelligent behaviors (M = .44), and that the proportion of Intelligent behavior recalled (M = .35) was greater than that for Neutral behaviors (M = .26). The List Type x Behavior Type interaction, F(2, 152) = 4.63, MS, = .03, was due to the finding that the recall advantage for the Unintelligent sentences was greater in the Intelligent Majority condition (mean advantage = .15) than in the Intelligent Minority condition (mean advantage = .04). The Disposition Focus x Behavior Type interaction, F(2, 152) = 6.76, MS, = .03, showed that the recall advantage for Unintelligent behaviors was TABLE MEAN
PROPORTION
4
OF BEHAVIORS
RECALLED
Behavior type Intelligent
Unintelligent
List type
Disposition focus
Neutral
Intelligent majority
Intelligent Sociable
.30 .32
.53 .39
.24 .29
Intelligent minority
Intelligent Sociable
.52 .26
.36 .49
.20 .30
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greater when the focus was “sociable” (mean advantage = .15) than when the reference trait was “intelligent” (mean advantage = AM). Qualifying all those effects was the three-way interaction, F(2, 152) = 8.45, MS, = .03. When the disposition focus was “intelligent,” the proportion of Unintelligent behaviors recalled was greater than the proportion of Intelligent behaviors recalled only when the Intelligent behaviors constituted the larger number of behaviors studied. With an “intelligent” disposition focus, the proportion of Intelligent behaviors recalled was greater than that for Unintelligent behaviors if fewer Intelligent behaviors had been studied. That is, with an “intelligent” disposition focus, the relevant items which formed the smaller pool of behaviors were more likely to be recalled. Under conditions where the focal disposition was “sociable,” the recall advantage for Unintelligent behaviors was greater when they formed the largest component of the behavior list. Discussion
The goal of Experiment 2 was to determine whether activation of dispositional categories by a list of behaviors depends upon the relevance of those behaviors to the dispositional set adopted during the encoding of the behaviors. This question was suggested by the interpretation offered for the results of Experiment 1 which assumed that irrelevant behaviors are represented differently than behaviors inconsistent with an activated category. The influence of the reference disposition was evident for all dependent measures. When the reference disposition was not directly related to the behaviors in the list, no differences in the likelihood ratings were found. The ratings in fact were equivalent to those for the Neutral behaviors in the “intelligent” focus conditions. The likelihood ratings showed that behaviors assigned to the various Behavior Type categories were indeed irrelevant to the “sociable” disposition, although there was a slight, but nonsignificant tendency for subjects to rate Intelligent behaviors as more likely for a sociable person. Not surprisingly, Intelligent behaviors were rated as more likely for the groups who had an “intelligent” disposition focus. Impression ratings were also dependent upon the reference disposition, but the effects depended upon the number of Intelligent behaviors in the list. When the focus disposition was relevant (“intelligent”), then subjects rated the person as high in intelligence if there were many intelligent behaviors in the list. However, when the reference disposition was irrelevant to the behaviors in the list, subjects rated the person highest on that irrelevant disposition. The final impression was determined not solely by the behaviors attributed to a person but also by the focus for processing those behaviors. When the combination of behaviors and focus were unrelated, then the behaviors had little influence on the impression and subjects tended to show a positive bias on the focus
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dimension. This bias is not sensitive to whether the majority of behaviors are evaluatively negative or positive. A possible explanation of this confirmatory bias (Greenwald, 1980) is that subjects did not consider the behaviors as strongly disconfnming the “sociable” category. The likelihood ratings support that suggestion in that all mean ratings for the “sociable” focus groups were positive. The recall results provide strong support for the hypothesis that the recall advantage of inconsistent items requires that a relevant category for organizing those behaviors be activated in memory. When the behaviors were studied from a relevant perspective, the behaviors inconsistent with the final impression tended to be recalled best. If the behaviors had been studied in the context of an irrelevant disposition, negatively evaluated behaviors were recalled best, and this effect was greater when the number of those behaviors was large. Wyer and Gordon (1982) found that impression formation instructions led to better recall of unfavorable information when the behaviors were not preceded by trait adjective information (Experiment 2), and they suggested that the advantage for unfavorable information arose from an increased likelihood that they would be organized around a trait retrieval cue. Most studies of recall under conditions which promote category recall, however, tend to report an advantage for the information inconsistent with that category. (Note that the advantage is stated in terms of the proportion of instances recalled, not the total number). The explanation offered by Wyer and Gordon (1982) implies that retrieval cues are formed for each pole of a personality dimension, and that remains a viable hypothesis when an equal number of opposing behaviors are studied as in their second experiment. In the present study the number of unfavorable behaviors influenced the recall of those behaviors when the behaviors were studied from the perspective of an irrelevant disposition. If the majority of behaviors determined the dispositional category activated as in relevant perspective conditions, then favorableness of the behaviors should not have predicted recall. That the pattern of recall was different for the relevant and irrelevant perspective conditions suggests that the category related to the majority of behaviors was not activated, and this is consistent with the equivalent impression ratings for the intelligent and honest scales in the irrelevant condition, The advantage for the negatively evaluated behaviors may stem from extra processing that they receive and the degree of additional processing may increment with an increase in number of negative acts. Direct support for this hypothesis awaits experiments which measure study times in a subject-paced task. The recall advantage for the negatively evaluative behaviors argues against claims that recall improves when items form a relatively small set (Hastie-& Kumar, 1979). When the disposition focus was irrelevant to the behaviors, the advantage for negative items increased as the size of that set increased. The implications of that
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effect for category-related behaviors is not evident. The recall results, however, are clear in showing that attention must be focused on a personality dimension in order for information inconsistent with that disposition to be recalled better than consistent information. Irrelevant information is not represented in a fashion analogous to that for the representation of disposition-inconsistent information, and memory for that information is determined by nonorganizational factors such as evaluative tone. CONCLUSIONS Both experiments showed that dispositional categories which represent behaviors related to the categories act as retrieval cues for the behaviors. The category representations demarcate behaviors consistent with the categories from those inconsistent with the categories. Experiment 1 suggested that the distinction in the representations of consistent and inconsistent information is qualitative rather than quantitative in that inconsistent behaviors are specifically tagged whereas consistent behaviors are implied by general category activation. Experiment 2 tested whether category activation occurs spontaneously when attention is directed to an irrelevant dimension. Recall patterns favored the negatively toned behaviors and there was no evidence that recall depended on category activation when attention was not focused on a relevant category. Personality categories guide the encoding and retrieval of acts when those behaviors are unambiguously relevant to the person judging the behaviors; in the absence of a relevant organizing category, the values inherent in the acts may determine how strongly those acts are represented in memory. REFERENCES Anderson,
N. H. (1968). Likeableness ratings of 555 personality-trait
Personality
and Social
Psychology,
words. /ournal
qf
9, 212-279.
Buss, D. M., & Craik, K. H. (1980). The frequency concept of disposition: Dominance and prototypically dominant acts. Journal of Personality, 48, 379-392. Cantor, N., 8z Mischel, W. (1979). Prototypicality and personality: Effects on free recall and personality impressions. Journal of Research in Personality, 13, 187-205. Cooper, A. J. R., & Monk, A. (1976). Learning for recall and learning for recognition. In J. Brown (Ed.), Recall and recognition (pp. 131-156). New York: Wiley. Forgas, J. P. (1983). The effects of prototypicality and cultural salience on perceptions of people. Journal of Research in Personality, 17, 153-173. Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist, 35, 603-618. Hamilton, D. L., & Fallot, R. D. (1974). Information salience as a weighting factor in impression formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 444-448. Hamilton, D. L., Katz, L., & Lierer, V. 0. (1980). Organizational processes in impression formation. In R. Hastie, T. M. Ostrom, E. B. Ebbesen, R. S. Wyer, D. L. Hamilton, & D. E. Carlston (Eds.), Person memory: Co&rive basis of social perception (pp. 121-153). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Hampson, S. E. (1982). Person memory: A semantic category model of personality traits. British Journal of Psychology, 73, l-l 1.
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Hastie, R., & Kumar, P. A. (1979). Person memory: Personality principles in memory for behaviors. Journal of Personality and 37, 25-38. Hemsley, G. D., & Marmurek, H. H. C. (1982). Person memory: consistent and inconsistent person information. Personality and Bulletin,
traits as organizing Social
Psychology,
The processing of Social
Psychology
8, 433-438.
Judd, C. M., & Kulik, J. A. (1980). Schematic effects of social attitudes on information processing and recall. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 569-578. Mandler, G. (1980). Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence. Psychological Review,
87, 252-271.
Reder, L. M., & Anderson, J. R. (1980). A partial resolution of the paradox of interference: The role of integrating knowledge. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 447-472. Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal ofExperimental Psychology: General, 3, 192-233. Rosenberg, S., Nelson, C., & Vivekanathan, P. S. (1968). A multidimensional approach to the structure of personality impressions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 283-294. Smith, D. A., & Graesser, A. C. (1981). Memory for actions in scripted activities as a function of typicality, retention interval, and retrieval task. Memory & Cognition, 9, 550-559. Srull, T. K. (1981). Person memory: Some tests of associative storage and retrieval models. Journal
of Experimental
Psychology:
Human
Learning
and Memory,
7, 440-463.
Wyer, R. S., & Gordon, S. E. (1982). The recall of information about persons and groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 128-164. Wyer, R. S., Srull, T. K., Gordon, S. E., & Hartwick, J. (1982). Effects of processing objectives on the recall of prose material. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42. 674-688.
OF RESEARCH
IN PERSONALITY
Disposition-Based
18,
179-194
(1984)
Categories: Structure and Salience Effects on Memory
HARVEY H. C. MARMUREK University
of Guelph
Two experiments investigated whether disposition-based categories inthtence the retrieval of behaviors related or unrelated to those categories. In Experiment 1, subjects studied a set of behaviors in order to form an impression of a target person. Impression ratings indicated which category had been activated. In an unexpected recognition test, accuracy was better for category-inconsistent information than for category-consistent behaviors. That result suggested that the structure of disposition-based categories includes qualitatively different representations of consistent and inconsistent acts related to the category. In Experiment 2, subjects rated behaviors with reference to a relevant or irrelevant disposition category. In an unexpected recall test, an advantage for category-inconsistent behaviors was found only when the behaviors had been studied from the perspective of the relevant category. It was concluded that categories are not activated spontaneously by the behaviors, and that acts judged as irrelevant are not represented in a form analogous to the representation of category-inconsistent behaviors.
Studies of person perception have recently begun to focus on the structure of mental representations of personality and how that structure influences impression formation and memory for behaviors of others (Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Wyer & Gordon, 1982). Buss and Craik (1980) proposed that the representation of a disposition is based on the frequency of a class of acts relative to the normative frequency. That is, a person would be categorized as “friendly” if that person performed a number of friendly behaviors which exceeded the norm for a given time period. The structure of a dispositional category was assumed to be similar to that for natural categories (Rosch, 1975) in that individual instances of a behavior category would vary in typicality. Hampson (1982) has also argued that trait categories refer to a constellation of actions. Both Buss and Craik (1980) and Hampson (1982) claim that one of the functions of The author gratefully acknowledges John Cassidy for his programming assistance and Lori Wilson for her assistance in data collection. Requests for reprints should be sent to Harvey H. C. Marmurek, Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario NlG 2W1, Canada. 179 0092-6X6/84
$3.00
Copyright 0 1984 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form resewed.
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the personality category is to enable the prediction of what future behaviors a person is likely to perform in that acts within a category tend to be associated more strongly than acts between categories. Recent research has demonstrated that expectations based on cognitive dispositional categories function to organize the perception and retention of behavioral information (Hastie & Kumar, 1979; Hemsley & Marmurek, 1982; Srull, 1981). Judd and Kulik (1980) claimed that those expectations activate schemata or categories of behaviors which determine the type of information that a perceiver is prepared to encounter. In a test of the effects of expectations based on bipolar personality characteristics, Hastie and Kumar (1979) showed that information inconsistent with the expectations was recalled better than consistent information. Hemsley and Marmurek (1982) replicated that outcome for conditions where a high percentage of the test information was consistent with the expectations. When the bulk of behaviors was inconsistent with the expectation-inducing information, however, the information consistent with that expectation gained a recall advantage. One hypothesis which accommodates that interaction is that a new category was instantiated as information inconsistent with a previously active category accumulated to a point where the earlier expectations were no longer tenable. Support for that hypothesis was found in the processing times and impression ratings collected by Hemsley and Marmurek (1982). Final impressions were determined by the size of a given set of behaviors regardless of whether those behaviors conformed to earlier expectations, and the duration of studying behaviors in a self-paced task was inversely related to consistency with momentary expectations. The latter finding is consistent with the suggestion made by Cantor and Mischel (1979) that the encoding of a set of inconsistent behaviors attributed to a person requires more effort than the encoding of a consistent set of behaviors. Although Buss and Craik (1980) and Hampson (1982) have provided descriptions of the way behaviors may be organized in the representation of a dispositional category, those descriptions do not include a mechanism which can account for the recall advantage for inconsistent behaviors. Models of information processing that can account for that effect have been proposed by Smith and Graesser (1981) and by Srull (1981). Although both models espouse an associative representation of the behaviors in categories, they differ in their assumptions about the interrelationships among the items in the associative network. According to Smith and Graesser (1981), the information in a category or schema is distinguished in terms of how typical the instances are of the category. When a typical instance is encountered, a general activation of the category results in the storage of a pointer indicating which category was activated. Presumably, all that is required to generate highly typical events is some knowledge that the general category to which they conform has been
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activated. The encoding of atypical events, however, consists of separate distinct tags for each presented event. It is the distinctiveness of the atypical event representations which affords a retrieval advantage in recall. The lack of distinctiveness among the typical events leads to intrusion of information consistent with the category but which had not been presented (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). In the model proposed by Srull (1981), events in a category are all directly linked to the general category representation. Additional links are formed to connect inconsistent items directly to one another, and to consistent items. That is, only items consistent with the category are not directly linked to one another. The extra links which connect the inconsistent items to each other and to the consistent items provide extra retrieval routes for those items and account for the recall superiority of the inconsistent information. Although the models converge in their predictions regarding recall of inconsistent information, they differ in their predictions of recognition accuracy. Srull (1981) reasoned from a “generation-recognition” theory of free recall that recognition does not entail retrieval; therefore, in recognition tests, no inconsistent item superiority effect should obtain since the extra retrieval routes favoring the inconsistent items should play no role in a recognition task. Srull (1981) included a recognition test in his studies and found no significant difference in the recognition of consistent and inconsistent information. However, Smith and Graesser (1981) did find that inconsistent information was recognized more accurately than consistent information. They concluded that the distinct tags for the inconsistent items mediated both recall and recognition; that is, as advocated by Mandler (1980), recognition retrieval mechanisms were proposed to overlap with those of recall. A possible source of the discrepant recognition effects found in those studies is the effect of sequential testing in recall and recognition. Cooper and Monk (1976) showed that a recall trial leads to learning which transfers to a delayed recognition test. In the Srull study, subjects were first given a recall test on the information studied, and about 12 min later they were given a recognition test on the same information. That sequence of testing may have led to levels of recognition which obscured differences in accessibility to consistent and inconsistent types of category information. In the Smith and Graesser studies, recall and recognition were tested for distinct sets of category behavior so that no specific transfer effects could occur from recall to recognition. Experiment 1 was designed to test the two models of category representation. Recognition differences between category-consistent and category-inconsistent information were studied under conditions similar to those studied by Srull (1981), but unconfounded by prior recall testing. Evidence of an advantage for the
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inconsistent information would support the model proposed by Smith and Graesser (1981). In addition to measures of recognition accuracy, measures of recognition latency were also collected. The purpose of including latency measures was to determine whether subjects did organize the information into a categorical set. Integration of information into an associative category may be indexed by the absence of afun effect (Reder & Anderson, 1980), where a fan effect refers to an increase in recognition latencies as the number of events relating to a given topic increases. The fan effect has been interpreted as indicating that each event is retrieved independently. When the events are organized around a theme, the fan effect will not be found if decisions are made with reference to the common organizing theme. To determine whether a category was activated by the information presented, the number of behaviors relevant to prior expectations was manipulated and the presence of a fan effect was probed. EXPERIMENT
1
Method Subjects. The subjects were 72 (45 females) undergraduates at the University of Guelph who were tested individually and were paid $4 for their participation. All subjects were tested by a 22-year-old female psychology major. Procedure and list construction. The study generally followed the “impression set” conditions used by Srull (1981) since those conditions are more sensitive to manipulations of type of behaviors than are conditions in which subjects expect a memory test (Wyer & Gordon, 1982). Subjects were told that the study was concerned with how people form an impression of others who have carried out certain acts. To induce an initial expectation on the part of the subjects, subjects read a list of five trait adjectives selected from Anderson (1968). The adjectives conformed to the following “polar opposite” personalities: intelligentunintelligent; honest-liar; and friendly-hostile. For example, the adjectives used to induce the expectation of an intelligent person were: intelligent, knowledgeable, skillful, clever, and scientific. The adjectives were shown simultaneously for 10 s on a 9-in. diagonal Electrohome monitor controlled by an Apple II+ microcomputer. Once presentation of the adjectives had terminated, the presentation of a set of behaviors began. The behaviors were presented as sentences, one at a time, for 5 s each. The sentences, which showed at least 90% agreement by 50 subjects who rated them in a pretest, were of three types: (1) sentences conforming to the expectation induced by the adjective set were “consistent” types; (2) sentences which induced an impression on the opposite pole of the personality dimension induced by the adjective set were “inconsistent” types; (3) sentences designed to induce a pole on one of the other two dimension were “irrelevant” types. Each adjective set had a pool of 12 sentences consistent with it, and these were sampled as follows in constructing the behavior lists. Each behavior list contained 22 sentences and formed one of three list types defined by whether the consistent or inconsistent sentences were greater in number. In a “consistent” list, there were 8 consistent sentences, 4 inconsistent sentences, and 10 irrelevant sentences. In an “inconsistent” list, there were 4 consistent sentences, 8 inconsistent sentences, and 10 irrelevant sentences. In an “equal” list, there were 8 consistent, 8 inconsistent, and 6 irrelevant sentences. For each list type, each pole of the personality dimensions was tested with four subjects who each received a different random sampling of sentences. Subjects who were tested with “consistent” and “inconsistent” list types were yoked so that a
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given pair of subjects was presented identical lists, but had studied opposing adjective sets. Thus, across all lists, the yoking procedure ensured that while initial expectancy was varied, the specific items tested for each expectancy were held constant. Similarly, for the “equal” condition, subjects were yoked so that for a given list, each of a pair of subjects saw opposing adjective sets. After the final sentence in a behavior list had been presented, subjects rated the fictional character’s personality on six bipolar 9-point scales, one of which corresponded to the dimension conveyed by the trait adjective set. A 2-min interval followed during which subjects assisted in scoring the ratings and discussed whether they had any difficulty in assigning values on the scales. No subject reported any diiculty in completing the personality scales. This was followed by an unexpected recognition test in which behavior sentences were shown on the screen, one at a time. Subjects pressed a response button to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether or not the sentence had been present in the earlier behavior set. The response and its latency were stored by a machine language clock program which was accurate within the range of + 1 ms. There were 24 sentences in the recognition test, of which 12 were old and 12 were new. For each sentence type there were four old and four new sentences; the old sentences were randomly selected from the behavior list with the restriction that no sentences had appeared in the first three or last three positions in the list. The new consistent and inconsistent sentences were selected randomly from the remaining eight sentences in the corresponding pool, and the irrelevant sentences were selected randomly from among the presented and nonpresented items. The order of items in the recognition test was determined randomly for each pair of yoked subjects. Design. The experimental design was a 3 x 3 mixed factorial with List Type (consistent, inconsistent, equal) tested between subjects and Sentence Type (consistent, inconsistent, irrelevant) tested within subjects. Subjects were assigned to the List Type conditions in a block randomized fashion.
Results The pattern for all the significant effects was similar for each of the personality dimensions tested and the analyses are reported for data pooled across the three bipolar personality dimensions. The level of statistical significance was set at .05 for all analytical comparisons. Personality ratings. These ratings were obtained as a manipulation check to determine whether the final impression of the fictional character was consistent with the initial adjective set. The impression rating on the relevant personality dimension was taken on a scale of 1 to 9 from the positive pole to the negative pole. Since the pole activated by the adjective list was counterbalanced across subjects, the following procedure was used to obtain a single index of rating consistency across all subjects. For the positive adjective sets, the actual rating given by the subject was used, and for the negative adjective sets, the value of the rating was subtracted from 10. For example, if a subject had seen the “unintelligent” adjective set and then rated the person a 9 on the intelligentunintelligent scale, the value assigned to that subject was 1. This procedure yielded a value equivalent to that for a subject who had seen the “intelligent” set and had rated the person a 1. Thus, across all subjects, the lower the value on the rating test, the more consistent was the rating with the adjective set which had been presented prior to the behaviors.
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The mean ratings were submitted to a one-way analysis of variance which showed that the List Type effect was significant, F(2, 69) = 3.43, MS, = 3.68. A Newman-Keuls test of the list means showed that ratings in the Consistent condition (M = 3.5) were significantly lower than the ratings in the Inconsistent (M = 5.1) and Equal (M = 4.4) conditions. That is, when the behaviors consistent with the adjective set outnumbered the inconsistent behaviors, the final impression of the fictional character was more likely to match the initial impression conveyed by the adjectives. The nonextreme values of the mean ratings indicate the moderating influence of the irrelevant behaviors. Recognition accuracy. The mean hit and false alarm rates on the recognition test are displayed in Table 1. A 3 x 3 mixed analysis of variance on the scores corrected for guessing, (Hit Rate - False Alarm Rate)/( 1 - False Alarm Rate), showed that only the interaction effect was significant, F(4, 138) = 3.72, MS, = .03. For the Consistent list condition, recognition was better for the Inconsistent sentences than for the Consistent sentences, whereas in the other two list conditions the direction was reversed. This pattern replicates the recall results of Hemsley and Marmurek (1982). The difference between Consistent and Inconsistent sentences was statistically significant for only Consistent and Inconsistent lists. Irrelevant behaviors were recognized significantly better in the Consistent and Inconsistent lists than in the Equal list. Recognition latency. The mean correct recognition latencies are shown in Table 1. A 3 x 3 mixed analysis of variance of those means yielded only a significant Sentence Type effect, F(2, 138) = 7.08, MS, = 43421. Latencies were longest for Irrelevant sentences, and the other types of sentences did not differ. The absence of a significant List effect shows TABLE RECOGNITION
PERFORMANCE:
MEAN
1
PROPORTION OF HITS AND FALSE ALARMS AND MEAN CORRECT LATENCIES
List type Sentence type Consistent
Measure
Consistent
Inconsistent
Equal
PO-W
.85 .I1 1257
.90 .I2 1286
.88 .09 1246
.94 1281
.79 .08 1262
.83 .05 1240
20 .Ol 1357
.93 .02 1408
.82 .03 1362
p(F.A.)
Latency (ms) Inconsistent
POW p(F.A.)
Latency (ms) Irrelevant
HIit) p(F.A.1
Latency (ms)
.09
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that latency was not affected by the number of sentences of a given type in a list; that is, there was no significant fan effect. The increase in latency averaged 106 ms across the list conditions where the Irrelevant sentences made up the ‘largest set, and the increase was 119 ms when the Irrelevant sentences made up the smallest set (Equal list). Although it is not customary to make strong inferences from null effects, the magnitude of the Sentence Type effect indicates that the null effect was not due to a lack of power in the present design. Rather, the failure to find a significant List effect may be viewed as replicating previous findings of retrieval driven by an organized category (Reder & Anderson, 1980). Discussion The major purpose of the first experiment was to test between two models of the associative structure of a personality category. Activation of a category was induced by a set of trait adjectives and a list of behaviors varying in congruence with that set of adjectives. Final impression ratings indicated that behaviors had a greater influence on the activation of a personality category than did the adjective set; that is, the final impression was similar to the disposition characteristic of the adjective set only when the majority of behaviors in the list were consistent with that disposition. Recognition of behaviors related to the final impression was an inverse function of that relationship; behaviors inconsistent with the final impression were recognized better than behaviors consistent with the impression. That outcome replicates the effects found by Smith and Graesser (1981), but does not support the results of Srull (1981) whose recognition data may have been confounded by an earlier recall test. Recognition of the Irrelevant sentences in the Consistent and Inconsistent lists mirrored that of the sentences inconsistent with the final impression, a result which indicates that those behaviors were encoded as distinct from behaviors typical of the category. Recognition did not differ among sentence types in the Equal condition and this may indicate that no single personality category guided recognition in that condition; however, the latency pattern in the Equal condition was similar to that in the other List Type conditions in that Irrelevant acts were recognized most slowly. Overall, the recognition data are more consistent with the model of category structure proposed by Smith and Graesser (1981) than they are with that posited by Srull (1981). Information inconsistent with or irrelevant to a final impression was recognized more accurately than behaviors consistent with that impression. Srull, who had failed to find recognition differences in his study, concluded that the organizational structure of the behaviors provides retrieval pathways which are not used in a recognition task. If recognition does minimize retrieval (see Smith & Graesser, 1981; and Mandler, 1980, for opposing viewpoints) and relies on dis-
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crimination, then according to Srull’s model consistent acts should be better recognized since fewer associative links emanate from them. The present finding of superior recognition of inconsistent behaviors is incompatible with that model, but supports the Smith and Graesser (1981) model which distinguishes between the activation of a general category of acts typical of a disposition and specific representations for acts atypical of that category. The recognition latency results indicate that categories did guide retrieval of the behavior since no fan effect was found. The more accurate recognition of the inconsistent and irrelevant behaviors (in the Consistent and Inconsistent list type conditions) may be attributed to their distinctive representations which are not embedded within the general category. Extra processing times for those behaviors (Hemsley & Marmurek, 1982) would be required to set up specific representations which differ from the representation of the consistent behaviors. That is, contrary to the claim made by Srull (1981), the distinction between the representations of behaviors consistent with or inconsistent with an activated dispositional category is qualitative rather than quantitative. An apparently problematic outcome from Experiment 1 is that the latency pattern of Irrelevant behaviors is similar across list types (slowest recognition time), while the recognition accuracy patterns are different. Latency of recognition may be determined by the degree to which the act in question is related to an activated category. That is, a first step in a recognition judgment may involve a determination of whether the test item is at all related to an activated category (cf. Reder & Anderson, 1980). Irrelevant behaviors would fail at this stage in all lists and then a detailed, time-consuming search of the unrelated items would follow. Recognition accuracy, however, might depend on the activation of a single personality category from which typicality of individual acts can be guaged. Single categories would be established only for the Consistent and Inconsistent lists. No advantage for the Irrelevant behaviors would occur in the Equal list condition since no single category was available in that condition to guide retrieval. These admittedly ad hoc processing assumptions imply that the fate of the irrelevant behaviors depends on whether attention is focused on a single category which acts to guide retrieval. EXPERIMENT
2
The purpose of Experiment 2 was to determine whether a personality category must be actively attended to in order for selective memory effects to occur. Hamilton, Katz, and Lierer (1980) found that study instructions affected behavior recall under conditions where prior expectations were not manipulated. That finding suggests that dispositional categories may be activated spontaneously. However, even in that case, it may be that the impact of those categories on the retrieval of behaviors depends upon the specific categories activated. Forgas (1983) determined
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how strongly subjects thought they would react to 16 personality prototypes, and examined recall of behaviors related to the most highly salient and least salient prototypes. Information inconsistent with the prototype was recalled better than consistent behavior only if the prototype had been rated as low in salience. For highly salient targets, consistent behaviors were recalled better. The stimulus materials in the Forgas (1983) study were categorically dissimilar to those used in studies showing a general superiority of inconsistent behavior recall and this difference suggests that direct comparisons with those studies may be invalid. For example, Forgas (1983) used college student prototypes (e.g., student radicals as highly salient; sporty types as low in salience) and the information describing those prototypes included a combination of adjectives and behaviors. Studies which find better recall of inconsistent information tend to use dispositional or trait categories which are exemplified by specific behaviors (e.g., Hastie & Kumar, 1979), and it is difficult to understand why those categories should be low in salience. Furthermore, it is not clear whether categories based on personality types are structurally equivalent to categories based on traits (Hampson, 1982). The important implication of the Forgas (1983) study, however, is that the salience of a personality category may govern how information related to that category is processed. Hamilton and Fallot (1974) have shown that the influence of inconsistent information on a personality impression varies with the salience of that information. Following from the work of Rosenberg, Nelson, and Vivekanathan (1968), who used multidimensional scaling techniques to determine implicit personality structures, Hamilton and Fallot (1974) argued that knowledge of a person’s social habits were not predictive of that person’s intellectual qualities, and vice versa. Subjects were asked to make judgments of how much they liked or respected a person about whom they had learned four traits, one of which was inconsistent with the others. The liking judgments were affected more by social information, and the respect judgments were influenced more strongly by the intellectual traits. Hamilton and Fallot (1974) concluded that the salience of the traits varied with the type of judgment required. In Experiment 2 the salience of a category for a set of behaviors was manipulated by asking subjects to process behaviors relative to a certain “cognitive set.” Wyer, Srull, Gordon, and Hartwick (1982) showed that attention to details in a prose passage varied with the perspective subjects were asked to take. That is, expectations for a certain category of information improved incidental recall of information related to that category. In Experiment 2, subjects rated the likelihood that a person of a particular disposition would carry out each of a set of behaviors, and groups of subjects differed in terms of whether the disposition of reference was directly related to the behaviors or not. If category salience must be high in order for the category to influence retrieval of behaviors, then different patterns of recall should be found for the predictive and
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nonpredictive reference dispositions. Specifically, recall of inconsistent behaviors should be higher than that for consistent behaviors when the focal disposition is predictive of the behaviors in the list, but not when it is nonpredictive. Method Subjects. The subjects were 80 (50 females) introductory psychology students at the University of Guelph and each received $4 for their participation. Procedure and list construction. The subjects were told that the purpose of the study was to obtain measures of how typical certain behaviors were of people characterized by different personality traits. Two lists of 24 behaviors were generated from the behavior statements used in Experiment 1. The Intelligent Majority list was comprised of 12 intelligent behaviors, 4 unintelligent behaviors, and 8 behaviors from the honest-liar dimension (4 from each pole). The Intelligent Minority list was made up of 4 intelligent behaviors, 12 unintelligent behaviors, and the 8 honest-liar sentences. Subjects were asked to rate each behavior on a scale of 1 to 9 where the numbers referred to how likely the subject thought a target person was to carry out the behavior. Low values indicated a high likelihood. There were four groups of subjects, with 20 per group, and the groups differed in terms of the list they studied and the reference disposition on which the likelihood ratings were based. Intelligent-focus subjects rated each behavior in terms of how likely it was that an intelligent person would perform it. There were two Intelligent-focus groups, and each carried out the ratings for a different list type (Intelligent Majority or Intelligent Minority). Since most of the behaviors in the list were relevant to the intelligent dimension, the social dimension was used to form a nonsalient condition (Rosenberg et al., 1968). Sociable-focus subjects rated each behavior in terms of how likely it was that a sociable person would perform it. There were two Sociable-focus groups, and each completed the ratings for a different list type. Subjects in the Intelligent-focus and Sociable-focus groups were yoked so that a pair of subjects was presented with the identical list. For each pair of subjects, the order and selection of items was random with the exception that all 12 available items for the majority set were used where appropriate. Behaviors were presented on the Electrohome monitor controlled by the Apple II+ microcomputer. The rate of presentation was 5 s per behavior during which time subjects made their likelihood ratings by pressing a button on a keypad on which were buttons corresponding to the numbers 1 through 9. The responses were recorded by the computer. After the last sentence had been rated, subjects were asked to indicate their impression of a person who would perform the acts they had rated. The impression ratings were taken on three personality scales: honest, intelligent, sociable. Subjects circled a number from 1 to 9 where high values indicated that the subject thought the person whose behaviors they had rated was characterized by the personality disposition in question. The experimenter discussed the ratings with the subject for about 2 min, and then asked the subject to recall as many behaviors as possible. Five minutes were allowed for the free recall task. Design. The study was designed as a 2 (Focus Disposition: intelligent or sociable) x 2 (List: intelligent majority or intelligent minority) factorial with 4 independent groups. Crossed with those factors was a repeated measures factor which differed depending on the dependent variable. For likelihood ratings and recall, the within-subjects variable was Behavior Type (intelligent, unintelligent, and neutral). For the impression ratings, the repeated measures factor was Trait Scale (honest, intelligent, and sociable).
Results Behavior likelihood ratings. The mean ratings of the likelihood that the focal person would perform a behavior are shown in Table 2. A
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TABLE 2 MEAN BEHAVIOR LIKELIHOOD RATINGS“ Behavior type List type
Disposition focus
Intelligent
Unintelligent
Neutral
Intelligent majority
Intelligent Sociable
2.8 4.0
6.1 4.6
4.2 4.1
Intelligent minority
Intelligent Sociable
3.8 4.4
6.3 4.1
4.2 4.8
a Lower values indicate greater likelihood judgments.
2 x 2 x 3 mixed analysis of variance showed that the ratings were significantly lower for the Intelligent Majority list (M = 4.3) than for the Intelligent Minority list (M = 4.7), F(1, 76) = 5.26, MS, = 1.72 and that the ratings differed across behavior types, F(2, 152) = 35.92, MS, = 2.09. The List Type x Behavior Type interaction approached significance, F(2, 152) = 2.47, MS, = 2.09, p < .09 and reflected the tendency for differences among behavior ratings to be greater in the Intelligent Majority list than in the Intelligent Minority list. The most important result of the behavior likelihood analysis was the significant Disposition Focus x Behavior interaction, F(2, 152) = 10.83, MS, = 2.09. That interaction showed that subjects rated Intelligent behaviors as most likely to be performed when the focal disposition was “intelligent.” When the focal disposition was “sociable,” the ratings did not differ across behavior types. In general, these results show that the reference disposition controlled how the behaviors were interpreted. Impression ratings. The mean impression ratings for each trait are shown in Table 3. A 2 x 2 x 3 mixed analysis of variance showed that the Trait Scale effect was significant, F(2, 152) = 6.27, MS, = 1.01 and TABLE 3 MEAN IMPRESSIONRATINGS’ Trait scale List type
Disposition
focus
Intelligent
Honest
Sociable
Intelligent majority
Intelligent Sociable
7.2 5.7
5.4 5.6
4.9 6.6
Intelligent minority
Intelligent Sociable
5.4 5.6
5.9 5.6
5.4 6.2
a Higher values indicate stronger impressions that the target person was characterized by the trait.
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entered into significant interactions with both between subject variables. For the Focus Disposition x Scale interaction, F(2, 152) = 25.8, MS, = 1.01, and for the Sentence Set x Scale interaction, F(2, 152) = 10.1, MS, = 1.01. The 3-way interaction was also significant, F(2, 152) = 4.12, MS, = 1.Ol, and that interaction resulted from the different patterns of impression ratings between the Intelligent Majority and Intelligent Minority conditions. Newman-Keuls tests showed that in the Intelligent Majority condition, subjects rated the focal person most highly on the “intelligent” scale when the reference disposition had been “intelligent” but in the Intelligent Minority condition no differences were found in the impression ratings for the “intelligent” focal person. However, in both the Intelligent Majority and Intelligent Minority conditions, ratings were highest on the “sociable” scale when the referent disposition was “sociable.” That is, the inthtence of the behaviors on the final impressions was overridden by the focal disposition. For example, a large number of intelligent behaviors were more likely to determine the impression of intelligence when the person forming the impression had studied those behaviors with an “intelligent” focus; yet with a “sociable” focus, that same set of behaviors led to a stronger impression for the sociable trait. Behavior recall. The mean proportion of behaviors recalled is shown in Table 4 for each type of behavior. A 2 x 2 x 3 mixed analysis of variance showed that all effects involving the Behavior Type factor were significant. The main effect, F(2, 152) = 16.66, MS, = .03 showed that the highest proportion of recall occurred for Unintelligent behaviors (M = .44), and that the proportion of Intelligent behavior recalled (M = .35) was greater than that for Neutral behaviors (M = .26). The List Type x Behavior Type interaction, F(2, 152) = 4.63, MS, = .03, was due to the finding that the recall advantage for the Unintelligent sentences was greater in the Intelligent Majority condition (mean advantage = .15) than in the Intelligent Minority condition (mean advantage = .04). The Disposition Focus x Behavior Type interaction, F(2, 152) = 6.76, MS, = .03, showed that the recall advantage for Unintelligent behaviors was TABLE MEAN
PROPORTION
4
OF BEHAVIORS
RECALLED
Behavior type Intelligent
Unintelligent
List type
Disposition focus
Neutral
Intelligent majority
Intelligent Sociable
.30 .32
.53 .39
.24 .29
Intelligent minority
Intelligent Sociable
.52 .26
.36 .49
.20 .30
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greater when the focus was “sociable” (mean advantage = .15) than when the reference trait was “intelligent” (mean advantage = AM). Qualifying all those effects was the three-way interaction, F(2, 152) = 8.45, MS, = .03. When the disposition focus was “intelligent,” the proportion of Unintelligent behaviors recalled was greater than the proportion of Intelligent behaviors recalled only when the Intelligent behaviors constituted the larger number of behaviors studied. With an “intelligent” disposition focus, the proportion of Intelligent behaviors recalled was greater than that for Unintelligent behaviors if fewer Intelligent behaviors had been studied. That is, with an “intelligent” disposition focus, the relevant items which formed the smaller pool of behaviors were more likely to be recalled. Under conditions where the focal disposition was “sociable,” the recall advantage for Unintelligent behaviors was greater when they formed the largest component of the behavior list. Discussion
The goal of Experiment 2 was to determine whether activation of dispositional categories by a list of behaviors depends upon the relevance of those behaviors to the dispositional set adopted during the encoding of the behaviors. This question was suggested by the interpretation offered for the results of Experiment 1 which assumed that irrelevant behaviors are represented differently than behaviors inconsistent with an activated category. The influence of the reference disposition was evident for all dependent measures. When the reference disposition was not directly related to the behaviors in the list, no differences in the likelihood ratings were found. The ratings in fact were equivalent to those for the Neutral behaviors in the “intelligent” focus conditions. The likelihood ratings showed that behaviors assigned to the various Behavior Type categories were indeed irrelevant to the “sociable” disposition, although there was a slight, but nonsignificant tendency for subjects to rate Intelligent behaviors as more likely for a sociable person. Not surprisingly, Intelligent behaviors were rated as more likely for the groups who had an “intelligent” disposition focus. Impression ratings were also dependent upon the reference disposition, but the effects depended upon the number of Intelligent behaviors in the list. When the focus disposition was relevant (“intelligent”), then subjects rated the person as high in intelligence if there were many intelligent behaviors in the list. However, when the reference disposition was irrelevant to the behaviors in the list, subjects rated the person highest on that irrelevant disposition. The final impression was determined not solely by the behaviors attributed to a person but also by the focus for processing those behaviors. When the combination of behaviors and focus were unrelated, then the behaviors had little influence on the impression and subjects tended to show a positive bias on the focus
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dimension. This bias is not sensitive to whether the majority of behaviors are evaluatively negative or positive. A possible explanation of this confirmatory bias (Greenwald, 1980) is that subjects did not consider the behaviors as strongly disconfnming the “sociable” category. The likelihood ratings support that suggestion in that all mean ratings for the “sociable” focus groups were positive. The recall results provide strong support for the hypothesis that the recall advantage of inconsistent items requires that a relevant category for organizing those behaviors be activated in memory. When the behaviors were studied from a relevant perspective, the behaviors inconsistent with the final impression tended to be recalled best. If the behaviors had been studied in the context of an irrelevant disposition, negatively evaluated behaviors were recalled best, and this effect was greater when the number of those behaviors was large. Wyer and Gordon (1982) found that impression formation instructions led to better recall of unfavorable information when the behaviors were not preceded by trait adjective information (Experiment 2), and they suggested that the advantage for unfavorable information arose from an increased likelihood that they would be organized around a trait retrieval cue. Most studies of recall under conditions which promote category recall, however, tend to report an advantage for the information inconsistent with that category. (Note that the advantage is stated in terms of the proportion of instances recalled, not the total number). The explanation offered by Wyer and Gordon (1982) implies that retrieval cues are formed for each pole of a personality dimension, and that remains a viable hypothesis when an equal number of opposing behaviors are studied as in their second experiment. In the present study the number of unfavorable behaviors influenced the recall of those behaviors when the behaviors were studied from the perspective of an irrelevant disposition. If the majority of behaviors determined the dispositional category activated as in relevant perspective conditions, then favorableness of the behaviors should not have predicted recall. That the pattern of recall was different for the relevant and irrelevant perspective conditions suggests that the category related to the majority of behaviors was not activated, and this is consistent with the equivalent impression ratings for the intelligent and honest scales in the irrelevant condition, The advantage for the negatively evaluated behaviors may stem from extra processing that they receive and the degree of additional processing may increment with an increase in number of negative acts. Direct support for this hypothesis awaits experiments which measure study times in a subject-paced task. The recall advantage for the negatively evaluative behaviors argues against claims that recall improves when items form a relatively small set (Hastie-& Kumar, 1979). When the disposition focus was irrelevant to the behaviors, the advantage for negative items increased as the size of that set increased. The implications of that
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effect for category-related behaviors is not evident. The recall results, however, are clear in showing that attention must be focused on a personality dimension in order for information inconsistent with that disposition to be recalled better than consistent information. Irrelevant information is not represented in a fashion analogous to that for the representation of disposition-inconsistent information, and memory for that information is determined by nonorganizational factors such as evaluative tone. CONCLUSIONS Both experiments showed that dispositional categories which represent behaviors related to the categories act as retrieval cues for the behaviors. The category representations demarcate behaviors consistent with the categories from those inconsistent with the categories. Experiment 1 suggested that the distinction in the representations of consistent and inconsistent information is qualitative rather than quantitative in that inconsistent behaviors are specifically tagged whereas consistent behaviors are implied by general category activation. Experiment 2 tested whether category activation occurs spontaneously when attention is directed to an irrelevant dimension. Recall patterns favored the negatively toned behaviors and there was no evidence that recall depended on category activation when attention was not focused on a relevant category. Personality categories guide the encoding and retrieval of acts when those behaviors are unambiguously relevant to the person judging the behaviors; in the absence of a relevant organizing category, the values inherent in the acts may determine how strongly those acts are represented in memory. REFERENCES Anderson,
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