Self-relevance and wishful thinking: Facilitation and distortion in source monitoring

摘要

When making source attributions, people tend to attribute desirable statements to reliable sources and unde-sirable statements to unreliable sources, a phenomenon known as the wishful thinking effect (Gordon, Franklin,& Beck, 2005). In the present study, we examined the influence of wishful thinking on source monitoring forself-relevant information. On one hand, wishful thinking is expected, because self-relevant desires are presum-ably strong. However, self-relevance is known to confer a memory advantage and may thus provide protec-tion from desire-based biases. In Experiment 1, source memory for self-relevant information was contrastedagainst source memory for information relevant to others and for neutral information. Results indicated thatself-relevant information was affected by wishful thinking and was remembered more accurately than wasother information. Experiment 2 showed that the magnitude of the self-relevant wishful thinking effect did notincrease with a delay.