The Constructive Nature of Memory • 217The experimental design of Marsh’s experiment is shown in
● Figure 8.11. Participants read a series of statements presented
one at a time on a computer screen for 5 seconds each. Some
statements were associated with the stereotype for males
(“I swore at the guy who insulted me”), some with the stereotype
for females (“I made a centerpiece for the dining table”), and
some were neutral (“I am very easygoing”). Each statement was
presented with a name, either Chris or Pat, and participants
were told to remember the statement and the person who said it.
After seeing all of the statement-name pairs, the participants
did a puzzle for 5 minutes and were then told that Chris was
a heterosexual male and Pat was a heterosexual female. It is
important to remember that the participants did not know Chris’s or Pat’s gender
when they fi rst read the statements. Once they knew the genders, they were given
the source monitoring task, which was to read the statements they had originally
seen and indicate whether they were said by Chris or by Pat.
The results, shown in ● Figure 8.12, indicate that the gender labels affected the
participants’ memory judgments. The graph plots the source monitoring score. A score
of 1.0 would be perfect source monitoring, with each statement linked to the correct
name. The left pair of bars indicates that 83 percent of the masculine statements asso-
ciated with the male (Chris) were correctly assigned to him, but only 65 percent of the
masculine statements associated with the female (Pat) were correctly assigned to her.
The right pair of bars indicates a similar result for feminine statements, which were
more likely to be correctly attributed to the female (Pat) than to the male (Chris).
What this result means, according to Marsh, is that if participants didn’t have
a strong memory for who made a particular statement, their memory retrieval was
biased by their knowledge of what “typical” males and females would say. The
infl uence of real-world knowledge therefore resulted in source monitoring errors. In
the next section we will describe a number of additional experiments that illustrate
how real-world knowledge can cause memory errors. As with the experiments we
have just described, many of these experiments can be related to source monitoring.HOW REAL-WORLD KNOWLEDGE AFFECTS MEMORY
The effects of creating familiarity and of gender stereotypes on source monitoring illus-
trate how factors in addition to what actually happened can affect memory. We will
now describe some more examples, focusing on how our knowledge of the world can
affect memory.Making Inferences Memory reports can be infl uenced by inferences that people make
based on their experiences and knowledge. In this section, we will consider this idea
further. But fi rst, do this demonstration.DEMONSTRATION: Reading Sentences (continued)
For this demonstration, read the following sentences, pausing for a few seconds after each one.- The children’s snowman vanished when the temperature reached 80.
- The flimsy shelf weakened under the weight of the books.
- The absent-minded professor didn’t have his car keys.
- The karate champion hit the cinder block.
- The new baby stayed awake all night.
Now that you have read the sentences, turn to the “Reading Sentences” demonstration on
page 237 at the end of the chapter, and follow the directions.“I like
baseball.”
ChrisBreak
(puzzle) Chris ismale.
Pat is
female.“I like
baseball.”
Source?Read statement
and source.
Gender is
revealed.Source
monitoring task.●FIGURE 8.11 Design of Marsh and coworkers’ (2006)
source monitoring and gender stereotype experiment.Masculine
statementsMale name
Female nameFeminine
statements01.00.5Source monitoring score●FIGURE 8.12 Result of March and
coworkers’ (2006) experiment.Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.