Immediate Recall of Consistent and Inconsistent Self-related Material

During the first session of the experiment each of 132 high school students was instructed to rate himself and two of his classmates on a list of 30 personality traits, either all desirable or all undesirable. One week later in the second session, each S was first given 10 minutes to look over his rating list on which bogus ratings of him, supposedly made by his classmates, were made discrepant with his self-ratings on half the traits and identical on the others, and then asked to recall the trait names and bogus ratings in that order. Contrary to the results of previous studies, recall oi inconsistent ratings was neither better nor poorer than that of consistent ratings. On the other hand, inconsistency-involving traits were recalled considerably better than consistency-involving traits, a finding in line with Brehm and Cohen's notion of immediate post-exposure salience of dissonance. Another finding of interest is that Ss having described themselves on undesirable traits recalled not only fewer traits but also fewer ratings than did Ss having described themselves on desirable traits.