Self-serving prototypes of social categories.

Biased memory retrieval in the service of shared reality with an audience: The role of cognitive accessibility.

“…As explicated above, we found evidence for a positive association between a motivated memory bias and differential cognitive accessibility of information that is congruent vs. incongruent with communicators' motivation (i.e., to create a shared reality). These findings thus extend demonstrations of cognitive accessibility resulting from self-serving memory biases (Santioso et al, 1990;Dunning et al, 1991).…”

“…These findings extend previous research on motivated remembering, which has mainly focused on the specific case of self-serving memory biases in self-related memories, i.e. biases in episodic or autobiographical memories of own past experiences or behaviors that help individuals to maintain a positive self-image (Sanitioso et al, 1990;Dunning et al, 1991;Kouchaki & Gino, 2016;Sedikides et al, 2016). At least two experiments within this previous research have also found some evidence for enhanced cognitive accessibility of self-serving information, which is consistent with the predictions from the ROAR model (Sanitioso et al, 1990, Study 3;Dunning et al, 1991, Study 5).…”

“…Study 1 addressed, for the first time, the question of differential accessibility of audience-congruent vs. audience-incongruent target information as the cognitive basis of the classical SIB effect, an evaluative memory bias that is motivationally driven by shared reality creation with an audience. Because there was no prior experience with the use of accessibility measures within the SIB paradigm, we tested two different measures that had already successfully been applied in previous studies in other topics within research on personality and social psychology, i.e., a reaction-time measure (Sanitioso et al, 1990;Dunning et al, 1991) and measure relying on a scrambled sentences task (Costin, 1969). The main aim was to establish at least one of these approaches as sufficiently sensitive method to detect differential cognitive accessibility of audience-congruent vs. audience-incongruent target information within the SIB paradigm.…”

“…All studies were performed as online studies. Study 1 was a preliminary study in which two different measures of cognitive accessibility were included to test their suitability within the SIB paradigm, one based on a reaction time task (Sanitioso et al, 1990;Dunning et al, 1991) and one based on a scrambled-sentences task (Costin, 1969). Based on the results of this initial study, the task that turned out to be the more sensitive measure of cognitive accessibility (a reaction time task), was further investigated in Studies 2 and 3 under conditions that were particularly conducive to the creation of a shared reality (experimentally enhanced perception of commonality between communicator and audience).…”

“…Such an approach to assess differential accessibility by a reaction-time measure has previously likewise been adopted by Sanitioso et al (1990), who found that the self-serving bias in autobiographical recall of desired traits was accompanied by faster recall autobiographical examples of desired than non-desired traits. A similar approach was also used by Dunning et al (1991;Exp.5) in the context of a study on self-serving biases on prototypicality judgments, where goal-oriented and people-oriented participants were presented with various attribute words (including attributes related to goal orientation and people orientation) and asked to indicate for each of the attributes as quickly as possible whether the attribute was associated with the concept of leadership or not. Reaction times for goal-oriented items were faster for goal-oriented than for people-oriented participants, while reaction times for people-oriented items were faster for people-oriented than for goal-oriented participants.…”