Abstract
People are motivated to remember past autobiographical experiences related to their current goals; we investigated whether people are also motivated to remember false past experiences related to those goals. In Session 1, we measured subjects’ implicit and explicit achievement and affiliation motives. Subjects then rated their confidence about, and memory for, childhood events containing achievement and affiliation themes. Two weeks later in Session 2, subjects received a “computer-generated profile” based on their Session 1 ratings. This profile suggested that one false achievement event and one false affiliation event had happened in childhood. After imagining and describing the suggested false events, subjects made confidence and memory ratings a second time. For achievement events, subjects’ explicit motives predicted their false beliefs and memories. The results are explained using source monitoring and a motivational model of autobiographical memory.
References
(1958). Thematic apperceptive measurement of motives within the context of a theory of motivation. In , Motives in fantasy, action and society (pp. 596–616). Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.
(2005). False memories about food can lead to food avoidance. Social Cognition, 23, 11–34.
(2005). Memory and the self. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 594–628.
(2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107, 261–288.
(1972). To dispel fantasies about fantasy-based measures of achievement motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 77, 377–391.
(1977). The achievement motive construct and its measurement: Where are we now? British Journal of Psychology, 68, 1–22.
(2007). Confabulation: Motivated reality monitoring. Neuropsychologia, 45, 2180–2190.
(2008). Is the content of confabulation positive? An experimental study. Cortex, 44, 764–772.
(1996). Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 3, 208–214.
(2005). Wishful thinking and source monitoring. Memory & Cognition, 33, 418–429.
(1999). Individual differences in imagination inflation. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 6, 313–318.
(2006). Memory attributions for choices: How beliefs shape our memories. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 163–176.
(1987). PRF-Form E. Sigma Assessment Systems.
(1999). Personality research form manual 3rd ed.. Sigma Assessment Systems.
(1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 3–28.
(1992). The affiliation motive. In , Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic content analysis (pp. 205–210). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(2004). Warnings reduce the magnitude of the imagination inflation effect. American Journal of Psychology, 117, 579–593.
(2008). The Red Herring technique: A methodological response to the problem of demand characteristics. Psychological Research, 72, 362–375.
(2003). Imagination can create false autobiographical memories. Psychological Science, 14, 186–188.
(1985). Human motivation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
(2006). Goal pursuit, goal self-concordance, and the accessibility of autobiographical knowledge. Memory, 14, 901–915.
(2009). Digitally manipulating memory: Effects of doctored videos and imagination in distorting beliefs and memories. Memory & Cognition, 37, 414–424.
(1999). Imagination inflation and the perils of guided visualization. Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 133, 581–595.
(2001). Assessment of implicit motives with a research version of the TAT: Picture profiles, gender differences, and relations to other personality measures. Journal of Personality Assessment, 77, 71–86.
(2008). Imagining nice and nasty events in the distant or recent past: Recent positive events show the most imagination inflation. Acta Psychologica, 129, 228–233.
(2005). Using source cues and familiarity cues to resist imagination inflation. Acta Psychologica, 120, 227–242.
(1990). Affective responses to autobiographical memories and their relationship to long-term goals. Journal of Personality, 58, 535–563.
(2005). Trying to recollect past events: Confidence, beliefs, and memories. Clinical Psychology Review, 25, 917–934.
(1992a). Reliability issues. In , Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic content analysis (pp. 126–139). New York: Cambridge University Press.
(1992b). Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic content analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
(1992). Methodological considerations: Steps in research employing content analysis systems. In , Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic content analysis (pp. 515–536). New York: Cambridge University Press.
(2002). A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 597–603.
