Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Our memories fail in part due to inadequate encoding and storage, and in part due to the inability to accurately
retrieve stored information. - The human brain is wired to develop and make use of social categories and schemas. Schemas help us remember new
information but may also lead us to falsely remember things that never happened to us and to distort or
misremember things that did. - A variety of cognitive biases influence the accuracy of our judgments.
EXERCISES AND CRITICAL THINKING
- Consider a time when you were uncertain if you really experienced an event or only imagined it. What impact did this
have on you, and how did you resolve it? - Consider again some of the cognitive schemas that you hold in your memory. How do these knowledge structures bias
your information processing and behavior, and how might you prevent them from doing so? - Imagine that you were involved in a legal case in which an eyewitness claimed that he had seen a person commit a
crime. Based on your knowledge about memory and cognition, what techniques would you use to reduce the
possibility that the eyewitness was making a mistaken identification?
[1] Rassin, E., Merckelbach, H., & Spaan, V. (2001). When dreams become a royal road to confusion: Realistic dreams,
dissociation, and fantasy proneness. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 189(7), 478–481.
[2] Winograd, E., Peluso, J. P., & Glover, T. A. (1998). Individual differences in susceptibility to memory illusions. Applied
Cognitive Psychology, 12(Spec. Issue), S5–S27.
[3] Jacoby, L. L., & Rhodes, M. G. (2006). False remembering in the aged. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(2), 49–
[4] Pratkanis, A. R., Greenwald, A. G., Leippe, M. R., & Baumgardner, M. H. (1988). In search of reliable persuasion effects: III.
The sleeper effect is dead: Long live the sleeper effect.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(2), 203–218.
[5] Stangor, C., & McMillan, D. (1992). Memory for expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information: A review of
the social and social developmental literatures.Psychological Bulletin, 111(1), 42–61.
[6] Trope, Y., & Thompson, E. (1997). Looking for truth in all the wrong places? Asymmetric search of individuating information
about stereotyped group members. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 229–241.
[7] Darley, J. M., & Gross, P. H. (1983). A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects.Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 44, 20–33.