Trait Judgments about the Self: Evidence from the Encoding Specificity Paradigm

Abstract

How do people decide whether a trait is self-descriptive? According to the computational view, judging a trait for self-descriptiveness is accomplished by retrieving trait-relevant autobiographical episodes from memory and computing the similarity of the trait to the information retrieved. By contrast, the trait summary view argues that trait judgments are made by referring directly to abstract, summary knowledge of one's traits in memory. In previous work using a priming paradigm, the authors obtained support for the trait summary view. This article discusses a potential limitation of that paradigm and reports results from a new paradigm that is not subject to the same concerns. The findings converge with those of previous studies on the conclusion that trait self-descriptiveness judgments do not require the retrieval of trait-relevant autobiographical memories.