Self reference effect

Updated on Dec 29, 2024

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The self-reference effect is a tendency for people to encode information differently depending on the level on which the self is implicated in the information. When people are asked to remember information when it is related in some way to the self, the recall rate can be improved.

Research

In 1955, George Kelly published an article on how humans create "personal constructs". This was a more general cognitive theory based on the idea that each individual's psychological processes are influenced by the way they anticipate events. This lays the groundwork for the ideas of personal constructs. Attribution theory is an explanation of the way people attribute the causes of behavior and events, which also involved creating a construct of self, since people can explain things related to themselves differently from the same thing happening to someone else. Related to the attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error is an explanation of when an individual explains someone’s given behavior in a situation through emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) rather than considering the situation's external factors. Studies such as one by Jones, Sensening, and Haley corroborated the idea that the self has a special construct, by simply asking experiment subjects to describe their "most significant characteristics". The results showed that the majority of responses were based on positive characteristics such as "sensitive", "intelligent", and "friendly". This ties in very well with other cognitive phenomena such as illusory superiority, in that it is a well observed fact that people rate themselves differently from how they rate others. In 2012, Stanley B. Klein published an article on the self and memory and how it relates to the self-reference effect. In recent years, studies on the self-reference effect have shifted from identifying mechanisms to using the self-reference as a research tool in understanding the nature of memory. Klein discusses words encoded with respect to oneself (the self-relevance effect) are recalled more often than words that are unrelated to the self.

Examples

The tendency to attribute someone else's behavior to their disposition, and to attribute one's own behavior to the situation. (The Fundamental attribution error)

When asked to remember words relating to themselves, subjects had greater recall than those receiving other instructions.

In connection with the levels-of-processing effect, more processing and more connections are made within the mind in relation to a topic connected to the self.

In the field of marketing, Asian consumers self-referenced Asian models in advertising more than White consumers. Also Asian models advertising products that were not typically endorsed by Asian models resulted in more self-referencing from consumers.

People are more likely to remember birthdays that are closer to their own birthday than birthdays that are more distant.

Research shows that long term memory is improved when learning occurs under self-reference conditions

Research shows that female consumers engage in self-referencing when viewing female models of different body shapes in advertising. For example, Martin, Veer and Pervan (2007) examined how the weight locus of control of women (i.e., beliefs about the control of body weight) influence how they react to female models in advertising of different body shapes. They found that women who believe they can control their weight (“internals”), respond most favorably to slim models in advertising, and this favorable response is mediated by self-referencing.

References

Self-reference effect Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

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Research

Examples

References