Directed forgetting affects how we remember and judge other people.

Abstract

The present study asks whether behaviors of another person can be intentionally forgotten, and whether forgetting affects how that person is evaluated. Participants read about negative and neutral behaviors of a fictional character and were then asked to forget or to keep remembering them. Afterwards, all participants learned of neutral behaviors associated with another character. After a short distractor or a 24-hour delay, implicit and explicit evaluations of both characters and memory for their behaviors were assessed. Implicit evaluations did not differ between the two characters and were insensitive to forget instructions. In comparison to the remember condition, participants who were told to forget recalled fewer of the first character's behaviors, and explicitly judged him as warmer and less dominant. Importantly, memory was negatively correlated with warmth and positively correlated with dominance ratings. The study shows that intentional forgetting can have long-lasting consequences for memory and explicit judgments of others.

Warning weakens retrieval-enhanced suggestibility only when it is given shortly after misinformation: The critical importance of timing.

“…Another relevant finding is that DF impairment can persist over significant delays (Abel & Bäuml, 2017;Scully & Hupbach, 2020), which is similar to the result of our Experiment 2. The long-term DF effect has important theoretical implications as it is inconsistent with the context change account and is not predicted by the inhibition account.…”

Can People Intentionally and Selectively Forget Prose Material?

“…For instance, Barnier et al (2007) demonstrated that people can intentionally forget autobiographical memories when these are generated by the participants in response to cue words and recalled together with the cue words at the time of testing. In addition, LMDF has been observed for product attributes ( Shapiro et al, 2006 ), simple actions ( Sahakyan and Foster, 2009 ), attitude statements ( Waldum and Sahakyan, 2012 ), line drawings ( Hupbach and Sahakyan, 2014 ), everyday objects ( Hupbach et al, 2018 ), and behavioral descriptions ( Scully and Hupbach, 2020 ). Thereby, the list 1 forgetting is typically eliminated when the items are related between lists (e.g., Conway et al, 2000 ; Barnier et al, 2007 ; Sahakyan and Goodmon, 2007 ).…”

Directed forgetting in the social domain: Forgetting behaviors but not inferred traits.

“…While there is evidence for functional independence (e.g., Carlston, 1980; Klein & Loftus, 1990), judgments can depend on behavior memory (Hastie & Park, 1986; Klein et al, 2002; Tormala & Petty, 2001). In a list-wise DF paradigm, we previously showed that explicit evaluations were related to behavior recall, and that both evaluations and recall were affected by DF instructions (Scully & Hupbach, 2020). In contrast to the present study, behaviors did not imply specific traits and participants explicitly evaluated actors on dimensions that were not directly linked to any presented behaviors.…”