Here ’s Why We Falsely Remember Completing Tasks We Had Intended To Do

By Emily Reynolds Finishing off a big task can be memorable, whether you sincerely feel you’ve achieved something or are just relieved to have got it out of the way. Everyday tasks, however, are much more mundane: taking your daily medication or typing in a password are unlikely to be particularly noteworthy events. You may also have found a gap between your intention to do a particular mundane task and actually enacting it — meaning you either can’t remember whether you actually did it, or misremember having done it entirely. It’s this phenomenon that Dolores Albarracin and colleagues from the University of Illinois explore for the first time in a new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.  In the first part of the study, participants played the part of a manager reviewing applications to model for a clothing brochure. In some cases, participants were asked whether they wanted to hire the applicant immediately; in others, they were asked to state whether they intended to hire the applicant later; and in a control condition, were asked to state whether the gender listed in a form about the applicant matched the gender of their photo. After a brief break, participants saw each applicant again and indicated whether or not they had made a final hire decision in the previous part of the study. As anticipated, participants were more likely to mistakenly believe they had already hired (or rejected) applicants in the “intention” condition th...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Memory Source Type: blogs
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