When you look at the people around
you, there is a tendency to assume that they will act like you do. That makes sense. One of the easiest ways to try to understand
the behavior of other people is to think about what you would do in the same
situation. And there is a tendency to do
this most when you think that the person you are judging is like you in some
way.
There are many aspects of memory,
and they can all influence our judgments of others. For example, not only are we able to recall
information about ourselves, but we also get a feeling for how easy it was to
recall that information. That feeling
can also influence our later judgments.
This issue was explored in a paper
in the April 2014 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Karl-Andrew Woltin, Olivier Cornielle, and Vincent
Yzerbyt.
Their studies took advantage of an
interesting way of decoupling what people remember from the experience of how
easy it was to remember information that has been used in many previous
studies. In one study, they were
interested in judgments of assertiveness.
They began by asking people to remember situations in which they themselves
had been assertive in the past.
Some people were asked to recall
only 4 situations. This group was able to remember these situations easily, and
so they had the experience that it was easy for them to think about being
assertive. A second group was asked to
remember 10 situations. This group had
trouble remembering 10 things and often recalled about 6 events. The interesting thing here is that this group
recalled more events than the one asked to remember only 4 events. But, it was hard to remember the events, so
people were left with the impression that it was hard for them to recall
situations in which they were assertive.
After recalling assertive
behaviors, participants saw a picture of someone of the same sex and were told
that person went to the same university.
They were asked to make a number of judgments about their traits. Some of those judgments focused on
assertiveness, while others focused on other characteristics.
In this study (and the others
reported in this paper), the ease of recalling events did not affect judgments
of unrelated traits. However, when
people found it easy to recall events in which they were assertive, they judged
the other person as more assertive overall than when they found it hard to
recall events in which they were assertive.
A second study demonstrated a
similar effect using creativity rather than assertiveness. Once again, participants who found it easy to
recall events in which they were creative judged the new person to be more
creative than those who found it hard to recall events in which they had been
creative.
This study also had a second group
of participants who were told that the design of the questionnaire influenced
their belief about how easy it was to recall events about their life. This group had a reason to feel like it was
either easy or hard to think about instances in which they had been creative. For this group, their judgments of the other
person were not influenced by how difficult it was to recall situations in
which they were creative.
Another study in this series found
that this effect occurred only when the person they were judging was similar to
themselves in some way. So, when the new
person was of the same sex and attended the same university, then their
judgments about the other person were affected by whether it was easy to recall
events from their own life. But, when
the new person was of the opposite gender and went to a different university,
then ease of remembering had no influence on judgments about the other person.
What does all of this mean?
Often, when we think about memory,
we focus primarily on the content of what we remember. However, there is also a lot of information
that comes in the form of feelings about our memory. One dimension of those feelings is the ease
with which things come to mind. Even
though that ease can have many sources, we tend to use that ease as a signal of
how commonly a particular event occurs in the world. That use of ease is related to the availability heuristic first described
by Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman.
Even though experimental
psychologists can do clever things to trick you into using these feelings in
the wrong way, they are generally a very good indicator of how commonly you
have encountered something in the world.
In the case of judging what other
people will do, it is also useful to knowledge about yourself to make judgments
about others. Human behavior is complex,
and it can be hard to reason about all of the factors that affect what other
people will do. Using your feelings
about what you would do in that same situation is a great first guess about
what others will do.
