Remembering Things That Never Occurred: The Effects of To-Be-Forgotten Stereotypical Information

Abstract

Participants, 68 female and male nonpsychology university students, studied stereotypical and nonstereotypical words either with an initially activated social category (immigrant prime) or with no social category (neutral prime). They were then instructed to either forget or remember the studied words. This was followed by a recognition test. Based on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm and stereotype-accessibility research, we anticipated that the participants in the immigrant, but not in the neutral, prime condition would falsely recognize more nonstudied stereotypic attributes under a forget than a remember instruction. The results supported our hypothesis. Implications of the outcome for eyewitness testimony, juridical decision-making, and stereotype maintenance are discussed.

When stereotypes backfire: Trying to suppress stereotypes produces false recollections of a crime

“…Our findings are well in line with previous work by Araya and colleagues (2003), Kimball and Bjork (2002), and Lenton et al (2001). These authors also noted that false memories are fostered by forget/suppression instructions.…”

“…A similar ambiguity is seen when it comes to the influence of stereotypes on memory. Stereotypes facilitate encoding and retrieval of stereotype‐consistent information but they may also lead people to remember stereotype‐consistent details that were never present (Araya, Ekehammar, & Akrami, 2003; Koriat, Goldsmith, & Pansky, 2000; Lenton, Blair, & Hastie, 2001; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Ford, 1997). False stereotype‐consistent information is especially likely to be reported when people are instructed to deliberately suppress stereotypes.…”

“…In the current experiment, we sought to examine whether an instruction to suppress stereotypes while reading a racially neutral crime story leads to false memories of and confabulations about non‐presented, stereotypical information. Inspired by the Araya et al (2003) study, we predicted that participants who are primed with a foreign group photograph (negative stereotype) and instructed not to think of stereotypes while reading a crime story will produce more false memories of stereotype‐consistent information on a delayed forced‐choice recognition task, compared with participants who are primed with a photograph of typical Dutch people and given the instruction to suppress stereotypes.…”

Personality trait inferences of Turkish immigrant and neutral targets: An experimental study

“…In fact, they were rated just as agreeable and conscientious as a neutral, in‐group target. Research conducted in the Swedish context, a country which is culturally similar to Norway, suggest that the most prevalent immigrant stereotypes center around two main themes; low conscientiousness (dishonest, lazy, (un) productive, thievish) and low agreeableness (aggressiveness, quarrelsome, careless, sexist) (Araya et al ., 2002; Araya, Ekehammar & Akrami, 2003). Thus, one would expect that the gap in personality judgments between immigrant and original population target is larger for these traits than for neuroticism, extraversion and openness, as well as clearly more negative.…”

When tolerance leads to intolerance: Accessibility effects on social judgment

“…For example, previous research on thought control (Wegner, 1994) indicates that when people are instructed to suppress their prejudice, they tend to increase their prejudice level dramatically compared to when they were not instructed to do so (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne & Jetten, 1994). Further, research shows that asking perceivers to forget or disregard stereotypic information may enhance the false memories of stereotypic behaviors that were never performed by members of stigmatized groups (e.g., Araya, Ekehammar & Akrami, 2003). Similarly, the results of the present set of studies suggest that a surreptitious activation of words that were related to tolerance may not lead to a positive judgment or description of individual members of stigmatized groups.…”