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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1977, Vol. 35, No. 9, 677-688
Self-Reference and the Encoding of Personal Information
T. B. Rogers, N. A. Kuiper, and W. S. Kirker University of Calgary, Canada
The degree to which the self is implicated in processing personal information was investigated. Subjects rated adjectives on four tasks designed to force varying kinds of encoding: structural, phonemic, semantic, and self-reference. In two experiments, incidental recall of the rated words indicated that adjec- tives rated under the self-reference task were recalled the best. These results indicate that self-reference is a rich and powerful encoding process. As an aspect of the human information-processing system, the self appears to func- tion as a superordinate schema that is deeply involved in the processing, inter- pretation, and memory of personal information.
Present research and theory in personality appear to be placing more and more empha- sis on how a person has organized his or her psychological world. Starting with Kelly's (1955) formulation of personal constructs, we see a gradual emergence of a number of avenues of inquiry that use this as their focal point. In person perception, the concept of lay personality theory stresses that the ob- server's analytic network of expected trait covariations is an integral part of how he processes (and generates) interpersonal data (Hastorf, Schneider, & Polefka, 1970). Bern and Allen (1974), in their embellishment of Allport's (1937) idiographic position, argue that an important determinant of predictive utility of trait measurement is the manner in which the respondent has organized his or her view of the trait being measured. These authors see the overlap between the respond- ent's and the experimenter's concept of the trait as a necessary prerequisite of predic- tion. Attribution theory (Jones et al., 1971) is another example of this increased accent on personal organization. Here the emphasis is on how the subject explains past behavior
This research was supported by a grant from the Canada Council. We would like to thank the fol- lowing persons for their useful ideas and comments on earlier drafts: F. I. M. Craik, E. J. Rowe, P. J. Rogers, H. Lytton, J. Clark, J. Ells, C. G. Costello, and especially one anonymous reviewer.
Requests for reprints should be sent to T. B. Rogers, Department of Psychology, The University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2N 1N4.
and how these explanations are organized in an attributional network. The common thread in all of these contemporary research areas is the notion that the cognitions of a person, particularly their manner of organ- ization, should be an integral part of our attempts to explain personality and behavior.
Of concern in the present article is the construct of self and how it is implicated in the organization of personal data. Our gen- eral position is that the self is an extremely active and powerful agent in the organization of the person's world. More specifically, the present research was designed to determine if self-reference serves a meaningful function in the processing of certain kinds of informa- tion. That is, we attempted to determine the relative strength of self-reference as an agent in the processing of people-related informa- tion.
The self is defined as an abstract repre- sentation of past experience with personal data. Phenomenologically, it is a kind of vague idea about who the person thinks he or she is. It probably develops to help the person keep track of the vast amounts of self-rele- vant information encountered over a lifetime. The self, then, represents the abstracted es- sence of a person's perception of him or her- self. A more formal definition of self is to view it as a list of terms or features that have been derived from a lifetime of experience with personal data. More than likely a por- tion of the list consists of general terms— not unlike traits—that represent the ab-
677
678 T. ROGERS, N. KUIPER, AND W. KIRKER
stracted essentials of a person's view of self. In addition to these general terms, there are also some more specific entries in the self. These relate to less salient and more situa- tion-specific aspects of self-perception as well as to specific behaviors. This definition is supported by Jones, Sensening, and Haley (1974). They simply asked subjects to de- scribe their "most significant characteristics." The most frequent entries in the obtained response protocols were positively worded terms such as sensitive, intelligent, and friendly. These appear to be the general terms in the self and appear to resemble traits. Jones et al. (1974, p. 38) also present a single response protocol. Of interest here is the tendency for conditionals (e.g., such situational hedges as sometimes) to emerge later in the protocol. Furthermore, as the protocol develops, the entries tend to relate to more specific situations than did the earlier terms (e.g., "have a hang-up about authority figures"). These latter entries appear to be the specific terms in the self.
One of the main functions of the self is to help the individual process personal data. When a person encounters a situation involv- ing personal information, this structure is activated and becomes part of the available information-processing system. For example, when students encounter a list of character- istics of a psychopathological state (e.g., in an introductory psychology lecture), they tend to interpret (and attempt to remember) these by referring them to their own views of self. Such a strategy could lead to the "medi- cal student syndrome," where students begin to see themselves in the varying states de- scribed by the lecturer. In extreme cases, some students can be convinced they are raving lunatics—despite repeated warnings of the instructor. Other examples of this self- reference phenomenon can occur in situations involving personal feedback, expressive be- haviors, and the processing of information about other people.
The central aspect of self-reference is that the self acts as a background or setting against which incoming data are interpreted or coded. This process involves an interaction
between the previous experience of the in- dividual (in the form of the abstract struc- ture of self) and the incoming materials. The involvement of the self in the interpretation of new stimuli imparts a degree of richness and fullness to the input because of the avail- ability of the immense amounts of previous experience embodied in the self.
The interaction between new input and previous experience, postulated to be central to self-reference, has been modeled in the cognitive literature under the concept of schema or prototype (Bartlett, 1932; Posner & Keele, 1968). For example, subjects shown a series of dot patterns tend to abstract a prototypical visual pattern and use it as a standard in a memory task (Posner & Keele, 1970). In personality, several recent papers have suggested that personal data are pro- cessed using schemata or prototypes. Markus (1977), using a series of measurements, cate- gorized subjects by whether dependence was part of their self. Schematics, or those with dependence as part of their self, were those who rated themselves as extreme on several dependence items, as well as indicating that they viewed dependence as important. As- chematics were midrange on dependence and low on importance ratings, representing sub- jects who did not have dependence in their general concept of self. On the basis of im- pressive convergent evidence, Markus (1977) found that schematics and aschematics showed differences in how they processed per- sonal data. For example, schematics were more resistant to incorrect personal informa- tion than were the aschematics. These data suggest that the traits, such as those found in the self, serve an important function in processing certain kinds of information.
Cantor and Mischel (1977) tested the proposition that traits function as prototypes using a recognition memory task. Subjects were shown a series of statements that rep- resented an introvert. When faced with a task requiring recognition of these statements from among some new introvert statements, subjects tended to misidentify some of the new items as having been original state- ments. This suggests that the concept of in-
SELF-REFERENCE AND ENCODING 679
trovert mediated subjects' processing of the initial set of statements. This mediation was postulated to be in the form of a prototype, which represents an abstraction of the con- cept of introvert from the initial items. The observed memory bias for new, yet conceptu- ally related items reflected the involvement of this abstraction.
The Markus (1977) and Cantor and Mis- chel (1977) data indicate that traits are im- plicated in information-processing functions. They appear to be involved in the organiza- tion, storage, and retrieval of personality- related information. Our view of self places these traitlike schemata or prototypes as gen- eral terms in the feature list making up the self.
Rogers, Rogers, and Kuiper (Note 1) ex- plored the manner in which this set of schemata is involved in processing personal data. They hypothesized that the self func- tions like a grand or superordinate schema. If the self is a schema, it should be possible to observe the kinds of memory biases docu- mented by Cantor and Mischel (1977). In one study (Rogers et al., Note 1, Experiment 2), subjects filled out self-ratings on 84 ad- jectives. Two and a half months later, these same subjects participated in a recognition memory study involving these same adjec- tives. They first saw a randomly selected set of 42 of the words, and then had to recognize these from among the total set of 84. If the self was involved as a schema, subjects should tend to falsely recognize new items that were rated as self-descriptive (i.e., Pos- ner & Keele, 1970). Each subject's recogni- tion protocol was divided into high, neutral, and low self-descriptive categories on the basis of their self-ratings. Performance for the 42 items initially shown in the recogni- tion study was not affected by degree of self-reference. However, performance on the new or distractor items (correct rejects) be- came poorer as degree of self-reference in- creased. In other words, more false alarms occurred as the adjectives became more self- descriptive. This clearly confirms the predic- tion derived from viewing the self as a schema.
To review, self-reference can be seen as a process involving the schema of self. This process involves the interaction between pre- vious experience with personal data and new stimulus input. When self-reference is in- volved, it should provide a useful device for encoding or interpreting incoming informa- tion by virtue of accessing the extensive past experience abstracted in the self. Contact with the reservoir of history embodied in the self should provide considerable embellish- ment and richness to an incoming stimulus. Rogers (in press) explored this possibility using recognition memory for personality items. Subjects instructed to "read the item, decide if it describes you, and use this to help your memory" performed significantly better than subjects receiving either no or different (i.e., imagery) instructions. These data, in combination with some older re- search (e.g., Cartwright, 1956), indicate that explicit instructions to use the self in a memory task increase performance, which supports the claim that self-reference serves to enrich input.
This enriching aspect of self-reference is the focal point of the present article. Our major concern is how powerful self-reference is as an encoding device. More specifically, self-reference is compared to several other encoding processes in an effort to determine the relative degree of richness and embellish- ment that self-reference imparts to the en- coding of adjectives.
The experimental manipulation used in the present context is an incidental recall para- digm, in which subjects make different kinds of ratings on a set of words. For example, a subject rates whether a given word means the same as a target word. This would be a semantic rating, as the subject must extract the meaning of the word to perform the task. The same subject rates whether another word is written in big letters. This is a structural coding task, since all the subject has to do is inspect the structure of the stimulus item rather than extract the meaning of the word. Other words are rated on a phonemic task, which involves deciding whether a word rhymes with a target. The self-reference rat-
680 T. ROGERS, N. KUIPER, AND W. KIRKER
ing, which subjects perform on some of the words, involves the respondent's deciding whether the word describes him or her. When the rating task is completed, each subject has rated one fourth of the words on each of the four rating tasks. These four tasks are thought to vary in depth, or semantic rich- ness, from the structural task as the most shallow to the semantic and/or self-rating task as the deepest. The test of coding strength comes when the subjects are given a surprise recall task at the conclusion of the ratings. According to Craik and Lock- hart (1972), words that have been deeply coded during the rating task should be re- called better than words with shallow coding. This manipulation permits us to determine the relative deepness of self-reference as a coding device.
Craik and Tulving (1975) have done a series of studies using this methodology. They have restricted their efforts to the structural, phonemic, and semantic types of tasks. Their results indicate that recall (or recognition) is best for semantic tasks and poorest for structural ratings, with phonemic in the middle. These data are interpreted as support for the position that the strength of the memory trace is "a positive function of 'depth' of processing, where depth refers to greater degrees of semantic involvement" (Craik & Tulving, 1975, p. 268). Presuma- bly the rating tasks (structural, phonemic, etc.) force the subject to code the word to a specific level, and the incidental recall is a function of the depth of these tasks. These kinds of results have emerged quite consist- ently in the cognitive literature (e.g., D'Agos- tino, O'Neill, & Paivio, 1977; Klein & Saltz, 1976; Schulman, 1974; Walsh & Jenkins, 1973).
Of particular concern in the present study is the comparison between incidental recall for words rated under the semantic and self- reference tasks. Both of these tasks involve semantic encoding, but there is an important difference between them. The self-reference task forces the subject to use the self in the rating task, whereas the semantic task does not. The self-reference/semantic com-
parison permits assessment of the degree to which the self aids in producing a stronger trace, in contrast to usual semantic encoding. If the self is an active agent in the encoding of personal data, we predicted that the self- reference rating would produce good inci- dental recall in this depth-of-processing para- digm. If incidental recall of the self-refer- ence words is superior to that for semantic words, the hypothesis that the self serves an active and powerful role in processing personal data would be supported.
The present article offers two experiments that examine this proposition. The first study involves a close replication of Craik and Tulving's (1975) initial experiments, with the self-reference task included. The second experiment replicates and extends the first study by using a different technique and different semantic rating task.
Experiment 1
This experiment is intended to determine the relative position of self-reference in Craik's (Craik & Lockart, 1972) depth hier- archy. The procedural details have been chosen to closely approximate Craik and Tul- ving's (1975) initial experiments in an effort to maximize the degree of comparability of the present results.
Method
The study has two main parts. First, subjects rated 40 adjectives on one of four tasks. This in- volved presenting a cue question, followed by 1 of the 40 adjectives. Subjects answered yes or no to the cue question as it applied to the adjective. The cue questions, along with the manipulations for each task, are presented in Table 1. After com- pleting the ratings, subjects attempted to recall the adjectives in the second part of the study.
Materials. The main items for this study were 40 adjectives that were deemed appropriate for a self-description task. They were chosen to represent a broad spectrum of possible characteristics and were selected from all of the trait descriptions found in Jackson's (1967) Personality Research Form A Manual. Thirty-eight of the adjectives, selected to be familiar to the subject population, came from this source. Two other adjectives (shy and out- going) were added to make up the total of 40.
We used Roget's Thesaurus to construct a further set of 40 synonyms for the semantic tasks. The
SELF-REFERENCE AND ENCODING 681
Table 1 Examples of the Rating Tasks
Task Cue question Manipulation
Structural
Phonemic
Semantic
Self-reference
Big letters?
Rhymes with x x x x ?
Means same as YYYY?
Describes you ?
The adjective was either presented in the same size type as the question or twice as large.
x x x x was a word that either rhymed or did not rhyme with the adjective.
YYYY was either a synonym or unrelated word to the presented adjective.
Subjects simply responded yes or no to indicate the self-reference quality of the presented adjective.
final synonyms chosen represented consensus among the three authors.
The phonemic task dictated a second supple- mentary list of 40 words that rhymed with the main adjective set. The authors generated a set of possible rhyming words, and consensus among our- selves was the final criterion for selection. Most (90%) of these words were adjectives.
A third supplementary list of nonsynonym, non- rhyming words was also required, so that one half of the cue questions could result in a no rating. Kirby and Gardner's (1972) set of adjectives was consulted to derive this list. Again, author con- sensus regarding the nonrhyming and nonsynonym quality of the adjectives dictated the final list.
A set of eight further adjectives and supplemen- tary words was generated to provide buffer items of four ratings each at the beginning and end of the list. These items, which were constant across lists, were not included in the data analysis. This was intended to minimize the effects of primacy and recency in the incidental recall task.
Four lists of adjectives were constructed, such that 10 adjectives in each list were rated under each cue question, and over the four lists, each adjective was rated under each cue question.
To guard against the possibility that wo-rated words are recalled differently than yes-rated words, each of the four lists was reversed to generate eight lists in total. For example, if in a given list, under the structural task, a word appeared in small letters (generating a no response), the reversed list would have the word presented in big letters (generating a yes response). The one exception to this counter- balancing was the self-reference task. Here it was impossible to have experimental control over yes and no responses, since the person's view of self would dictate his or her response.
In all lists, order of the cue questions was ran- domly assigned in blocks of eight trials, such that each combination of cue question and expected response was represented once every eight trials.
Procedure. Subjects were tested individually. Ini-
tial instructions did not indicate that recall was expected. All stimuli were displayed on a television monitor driven by a P D P 8 / 1 computer, which also recorded the ratings and rating times. Including the four buffer items at the end and beginning of the list, there were 48 rating trials. Each of these con- sisted of (a) a 3-sec presentation of the cue ques- tion, (b) a 500-msec blank interval, (c) presentation of the target adjective, which was terminated by the subject's response, indicated on a two-button response panel placed comfortably in front of the subject, and (d) a 2-sec intertrial interval before the next cue question was presented. After the rat- ing task, the subject was given a piece of paper and was asked to recall, in any order, the adjectives he or she had rated. Three minutes were allowed for recall.
Subjects. Volunteers from the introductory psy- chology subject pool served as subjects. There were 32 subjects (16 female and 16 male) with an average age of 20.2 years. Each was paid $1.50 for par- ticipating. Subjects were randomly assigned to the eight list conditions, yielding 4 subjects per order. .
Results and Discussion
For each subject, the number of adjectives recalled as a function of rating task (struc- tural, phonemic, etc.) and observed yes or no rating was calculated. The means of these figures are presented in the top panel of Table 2. A 4 (rating tasks) X 2 (yes/no rat- ing) two-way analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect of rating task, F(3, 93) = 29.01, p < .001. Newman-Keuls tests indicated meaningful differences (p < .05 or better) in the recall for all points in this main effect except for the structural-pho- nemic comparison. The main effect of rating was also significant, F(l, 31) = 4.22, p<
682 T. ROGERS, N. KUIPER, AND W. KIRKER
.05, indicating superior recall for words given a yes rating. The Rating Task X Rating in- teraction was also significant, F ( 3 , 93) = 3.47, p < .05. Post hoc tests of this inter- action revealed a meaningful yes/no differ- ence for the self-reference rating, £(31) = 2.62, p < .05.
The overall pattern of these results is simi- lar to that typically found in the literature (e.g., Experiments 1, 2, and 3 in Craik & Tulving, 1975). The main effect of rating task is used to suggest that the depth to which items are processed during the rating task determines the strength of the memory trace. As recall is a function of trace strength, the present results support this position.
Of central interest is the finding that the self-reference task develops a stronger trace than the semantic task, as shown by the sig- nificant recall differences between these two conditions. This result clearly supports the idea that self-reference functions as a pow- erful coding device. In the case of self-refer- ence ratings, the subject uses his or her con- cept of self to respond to the adjective. The self-ratings involve comparison of the in- coming adjective with the terms and sche-
mata that are part of the self (see Rogers, 1974). This comparison culminates in the subject's yes/no response, which leads to a strong and specific encoding of the rated item. During the recall phase of the study, items with this detailed and specific encoding are easily retrieved, producing good recall performance.
In the semantic rating task it is unneces- sary for an elaborate structure such as the self to be involved. Rather, the subject ac- cesses his associative memory (e.g., Estes, 1976) for the target adjective and makes his synonymity judgment from this. The result- ing trace is not as specific or detailed as that involved with self-reference. Clearly, the ac- cess of associative memory produces a more detailed trace than either the structural or phonemic tasks. However, when compared to self-reference, the trace derived from a syno- nymity judgment is relatively weak. This difference in the specificity of the self-refer- ence and semantic tasks seems to be the major reason for the inferior incidental re- call of the semantically rated words.
The time required to make the ratings is typically used to monitor the effectiveness
Table 2 Recall, Rating Time, and Adjusted Recall as a Function of Rating Task and Rating for Experiment 1
Rating
yes no
Total
yes no
M
yes no
M
Structural
.28
.06
.34
1,267 1,474
1,371
.05a
.01
.03
Rating
Phonemic
Mean recall
.34
.34
.68
task
Semantic
.65
.68
1.33
Mean rating time (msec)
2,177 2,104
2,141
Mean adjusted recall
.08
.06
.07
2,255 3,006
2,631
.14
.12
.13
Self-reference
1.78 1.06
2.84
3,194 2,689
2,941
.30
.29
.30
Total
3.05 2.14
5.19
M
2,223 2,318
2,271
M
.14
.13
.13
a This figure represents the mean (over 32 subjects) of the number of recalled ^5-rated structural items divided by the number of yes ratings made on the structural task.
SELF-REFERENCE AND ENCODING 683
of the experimental manipulations in this paradigm. Further, these reaction time (RT) data provide convergent evidence for self- reference as a useful encoding task. The RTs from the present study were sorted separately for each subject into yes/no by rating-task categories. The means are presented in the middle panel of Table 2. Only the main effect of rating task was significant in this analysis, F ( 3 , 93) = 10.35, p < .001. A clear linear trend in RTs is evident in these data, indi- cating maximal RT for the self-reference rating task.1 This analysis replicates Craik and Tulving (1975) and is clearly compat- ible with the recall data presented above, supporting the involvement of the self as a coding device.
The finding that yes-rated words are re- called better than «0-rated words occurs in other studies and has a number of interesting implications. Craik explains these data by arguing that in the case of yes-ra,ted words, the "encoding questions or context forms an integrated unit with the target word" (Craik & Tulving, 1975, p. 291). Presumably this integrated unit forms a stronger trace than less integrated ones (no-rated words), thereby augmenting recall. The interaction observed in the present data indicates that this yes/no difference occurred only for the self-reference case, which suggests that items viewed as self-descriptive (yes-rated words) form a "more integrated unit" than do non-self-descriptive terms. These results strengthen even more our view of self, as it appears that terms that match the subject's self-view become more integrated than those that do not match. This finding is consonant with both Markus's (1977) and Cantor and MischePs (1977) finding that personal data are processed using schemalike structures.
There are several aspects of these data that require examination before the previous conclusions are fully warranted. The yes/no difference in recall for self-reference words could be due to a differential number of yes responses as a function of rating task. Since experimental control over the number of yes responses was not possible for the self-refer- ence task, this is a distinct possibility. For
each subject, the number of yes responses made under each rating task (maximum = 10) was calculated. The means were 5.00, 4.34, 4.06, and 6.13 for the structural, pho- nemic, semantic and self-reference tasks, re- spectively. A simple analysis of variance on these figures revealed a significant effect, F(3, 93) = 16.99, p < .001, indicating that number of yes responses is related to rating task. The deviations from 50% yes responses for the phonemic and semantic tasks are due to the difficulty of constructing exact rhymes and synonyms for the adjectives.
More important than the significant varia- tion in number of yes responses is the pos- sible effect this might have on the recall data. Since it is already known that yes-rated words are better recalled (e.g., Craik & Tulving, 1975), it is possible that self-refer- ence recall was superior because subjects made more yes responses in the self-reference task. To assess this, the recall data were transformed to a proportion score that ad- justs for differential numbers of yes re- sponses. Specifically, a particular subject's re- call of ;yej-rated words under a specific rating task was divided by the number of yes rat- ings the subject made while doing the task. This transformed score represents the pro- portion of recalled words the subject rated as yes. Similarly, the wo-rated word recall under a given rating task can be divided by the number of no responses made on this rat-
1 It is possible that items with large RTs are better recalled, calling into question this interpreta- tion. If study time is the important factor, its effects should be observable within each task as well as across tasks. Thus, within a given rating task, the items with the longer study times should be recalled better. To explore this, the 10 RTs under each of the four rating tasks were subdivided separately for each subject into a fast and a slow subset (5 RTs in each). The recall for these sub- sets was analyzed in a 4 (rating tasks) X 2 (fast and slow study times) two-way analysis of variance. The study-time hypothesis predicts significant effects for the terms involving study time. The analysis in- dicated only the expected main effect of rating task, F(3, 93) = 3 0 . 8 5 , p < .001. This analysis weakens the study-time interpretation and reinforces the interpretation that the recall data are due to the qualitative nature of the various encoding tasks.
684 T. ROGERS, N. KUIPER, AND W. KIRKER
ing task to provide a score representing the proportion of recalled words rated as no. Note that this is a subject-specific correction that reflects recall corrected for differential numbers of yes and no ratings. The means of the adjusted recall scores are presented in the bottom panel of Table 2. An analysis of variance of these data revealed only a main effect of rating task, F ( 3 , 93) = 3 1 . 6 3 , p < .001. The important recall difference between semantic and self-reference survived this ad- justment (p<.0l), but the yes/no differ- ence for the self-reference task did not. This analysis reaffirms self-reference as a coding tool but questions the possibility that yes- rated items form a more integrated unit.
In summary, the data from Experiment 1 provide evidence that self-reference is a pow- erful encoding device. The superior incidental recall of adjectives rated under the self-refer- ence task, in combination with the RT data, suggests that self-reference provides a rich and powerful encoding. The involvement of self in the rating task provides a good en- coding unit, which functions effectively as a memory cue.
Experiment 2
It is possible that the superiority of self- reference encoding documented in Experi- ment 1 is specific to synonymity ratings. Maybe other kinds of semantic tasks would produce equally powerful results. Semantic
tasks can be thought of as a family of judg- ments, all of which involve the extraction (and possibly some elaboration) of the mean- ing of the target item. Such tasks as syno- nymity ratings, judgments of semantic speci- ficity, and deciding whether a word fits into a sentence frame can be considered members of this semantic family. Experiment 2 em- ployed meaningfulness ratings as the semantic task. Since recall is a function of meaning- fulness (see Noble, 1952; Paivio, Yuille, & Rogers, 1969), this encoding task should be very beneficial for recall, particularly for words given a yes rating. If self-reference emerges as superior to meaningfulness rat- ings, evidence confirming the strength and re- liability of self-reference as an encoding de- vice will be provided.
A second purpose of this experiment is to explore the robustness of the self-reference findings. Experiment 1 was performed using fairly tight experimental controls. The pres- ent experiment deviates from this by using a group testing procedure. Craik and Tulving (1975) and Klein and Saltz (1976) have used similar procedures and replicated the findings from more rigorous paradigms, sug- gesting that the self-reference finding should stand up in this group procedure.
Method
The four rating tasks used for this experiment are outlined in Table 3. Subjects were given a
Table 3 Rating Tasks and Mean Adjusted Recall for Experiment 2
Rating task
Structural
Phonemic
Semantic
Self-reference
M
Cue question
Long?
Rhythmic?
Meaningful?
Describes you ?
Definition
Rate whether you feel the word is long or short.
Rate whether you feel the word has a rhythmic or lyrical sound.
Rate whether you feel the word is meaningful to you.
Indicate whether the word describes you.
Mean
Yes rating
.21
.20
.23
.33
.24
adjusted
No rating
.18
.18
.15
.31
.21
recall
M
.20
.20
.19
.32
.23
SELF-REFERENCE AND ENCODING 685
rating- sheet which indicated which of the four tasks they were to perform on a given word; this was indicated by the cue questions from Table 3. After the subjects had read the task cue to them- selves, an adjective was read aloud by the experi- menter, and the subjects made their yes or no re- sponses on the sheet. After the ratings, subjects turned over their rating sheets and attempted to recall the adjectives.
Materials. The 40 adjectives used in Experiment 1 made up the target items in this study. Four different task orders were generated, such that each adjective was rated under each task considered across the four orders, and within each order one fourth of the words were rated under each task. Within each list the order of tasks was randomized in blocks of four, such that each task was repre- sented once in every four trials.
Procedure. Subjects were run in one group. After instructions, the experimenter read the item number, said the word task (which cued the subjects to read the cue question), and then read out the adjective. After 40 such trials, subjects were given 3 minutes to recall, in any order, as many of the adjectives as they could. Subjects were not expecting this free- recall task.
Subjects. Twenty-seven students in a fourth- year summer class served as subjects. The mean age was 27.7 years.
Results and Discussion
For each subject, recall as a function of rating task and rating was calculated. These figures were converted to adjusted recall scores following the procedures for Experi- ment 1. The means of the adjusted recall scores are presented in the far right columns of Table 3. Analysis of variance of the ad- justed recall scores produced a lone signifi- cant main effect of rating task, F(3, 78) = 4.20, p < .01, and a meaningful semantic/ self-reference recall difference (p < .05).
Experiment 2 demonstrates self-reference recall superiority when a meaningful rating task is used. This kind of task has been pre- viously implicated in recall, resulting in a seemingly powerful semantic encoding task. However, the present results indicate that self-reference still is the more useful encod- ing task in this paradigm.2
Taken in total, the results of these ex- periments indicate that self-reference induces superior incidental recall compared to a di- versity of strictly semantic rating tasks. The important thing is that self-reference appears
to produce recall that is superior to any other task ever used in the incidental recall para- digm. This by itself attests to the power of self-reference.
General Discussion
As a test of encoding strength, the depth- of-processing paradigm forces the subject to process stimuli to a specific depth by having the subject rate the words on different tasks. During the rating task a memory trace of the rated word is created. Tasks that are deep or semantically rich produce strong traces, which in turn serve as useful cues in the incidental recall of the rated words. The rela- tive power of an encoding device is corre- lated with incidental recall in this paradigm. The present data indicate unequivocally that words rated under the self-reference task show superior recall. This indicates that self- reference represents a powerful and rich en- coding device. Clearly, self-reference pro- duces a rich encoding unit that can function effectively during information processing (see also Markus, 1977; Rogers, in press; Rogers et al., Note 1).
The major difference between the semantic and self-reference encoding tasks lies in the involvement of self in the latter rating. The self is a superordinate schema that contains an abstracted record of a person's past ex- perience with personal data. The richness of self-reference encoding shown in the present article is due to the access of this schema. The semantic rating task does not force in- volvement of a powerful schema, and hence fails to induce as powerful and rich an en-
2 The same pattern of results has been replicated twice for this group procedure using different semantic rating tasks. Typically this group proce- dure fails to replicate Craik and Tulving's (1975) findings for the structural, phonemic, and semantic tasks (see Table 2 ) . This is probably due to the rating tasks used. For example, in the structural task some subjects may have rated whether the word was a "big" word (rather than long), which would be a semantic task. Regardless of this prob- lem, the important semantic/self-reference difference clearly emerged in all studies using the group pro- cedure.
686 T. ROGERS, N . KUIPER, AND W. KIRKER
coding unit. The mere act of making a self- referent decision produces such powerful in- ternal reactions that the attending memory trace is stronger than any observed in the present experimental situation.
In order for self-reference to be such a useful encoding process, the self must be a uniform, well-structured concept. During the recall phase of the study, subjects probably use the self as a retrieval cue (e.g., Mosco- vitch & Craik, 1976). In order for this to be functional, the self must be a consistent and uniform schema. This property of the self is also shown by Rogers et al. (Note 1), who were able to predict memory perform- ance with a measure of self taken 2\ months earlier. The present data support the con- tention that the self is a well-structured and powerful schema. Presumably the self-refer- ent decision activates the superordinate schema of self as well as the salient sub- schemata. The strength of the trace devel- oped from this activation suggests that a consistent and well-structured schema under- lies these decisions. This consistency pro- duces a rich and effective encoding unit, which accounts for the present data.
The present data permit some further statements about the schema properties of the self. Considering the four experiments reported here (including the two supplemen- tary studies in Footnote 2), it has been con- sistently found that yes-rated items are better recalled than »0-rated items in the self-reference task.3 These data support the schema view, since ;yes-rated items would fit more easily into the schema, and thereby form a more integrated encoding unit (Schul- man, 1974). Such a pattern of results is com- patible with Markus (1977) and Cantor and Mischel (1977) and further reinforces a view of the self as a schema.
The data indicating that the self is a schema prompt consideration of how the vari- ous traits (i.e., subschemata) and specific elements (i.e., individual behaviors) are or- ganized within this structure. The terms of the self are organized in an hierarchical fashion, with the most central traits repre- sented initially. At first blush, it seems rea-
sonable to think that this hierarchy relates to extremity. That is, the initial trait in the self would be a person's most extreme trait, followed by the second most extreme, and so on, until meaningful traits for the person were exhausted. This simple extremity or- ganization may hold for some persons, but another aspect of the traits must also be con- sidered. Specifically, the salience of a trait for a person also adds to the organization of self. For example, a person who views him or herself in the midrange on "friendly," may perceive this characteristic as excep- tionally important, and thereby have it in- cluded in the self. Markus (1977) included this consideration when she used importance ratings in her definition of schematics. This aspect of traits or constructs has also been discussed under the labels of centrality (Snygg & Combs, 1949) and salience (Jack- son, Note 2). The important thing to note is that the traits involved in a person's self are not necessarily the most extreme ones. Rather, they represent a mix of salience and extremity.
The inclusion of specific behaviors in the self derives from the work in cognition. Pos- ner and Keele (1968) postulate that a per- son stores both the prototype and some in- dication of how a given stimulus deviates from this norm. This means that a schema, by virtue of its abstract property, must also contain specific data indicating aspects of the previous input that do not conform to the abstracted structure.
In sum, the self contains a set of ordered features. The ordering appears to be from general to specific, with the general terms (e.g., traits) ordered by a combination of salience and extremity. The general terms can serve as schemata when studied inde- pendently of a person's idiographic view of self (e.g. Cantor & Mischel, 1977; Markus, 1977).
The present data stress how the self can
^Statistical significance for this difference tends to disappear in the adjusted recall analyses. How- ever, the consistent emergence of the effect across this series of experiments (even in the adjusted re- call data) suggests a substantial effect.
SELF-REFERENCE AND ENCODING 687
become involved in the encoding of personal data. Focusing on the organizational proper- ties of the self is by no means new (e.g., Bertocci, 1945; Gergen, 1971). In fact, as early as James (1890) the self has been postulated to be an active agent in the over- all human cognitive apparatus. The present research adds to this tradition by providing a strong empirical test of a proposition deriv- ing from such a view of self. Our emphasis is upon the information-processing functions of the self, specifically relating to self-reference as an encoding device. This represents a neo- mentalistic approach (Paivio, 1975) to the self. While behavioral evidence (i.e., memory performance) is the key element in this ap- proach, the focal concern is upon the inferred construct—in this case, the self.
It should be noted that there are certain classes of information likely to receive self- reference encoding. Only after certain con- textual information indicates that the self may be a functional aid to processing will the schema be activated. In the present con- text, we forced this process with the encod- ing task. In real life situations, it seems likely that the self would be functional in a number of situations involving feedback of personal data, such as conversations, expres- sive behaviors, and attempts to assess per- sonal impact on others. The kinds of situa- tions that activate this schema or possible individual differences in the frequency and intensity of the involvement of self in data processing may prove to be very useful ex- tensions of the present formulation.
Probably the main advantage of the pro- cess-oriented view of information processing underlying our approach to self is the oppor- tunity to move toward less descriptive models of social behavior. If we understand the processes and mechanisms underlying the processing of personal information, we will have a real opportunity to construct sub- stantive models based on hard experimental findings (see Sechrest, 1976). For example, the finding that the self induces certain biases during the processing of personal data (Cantor & Mischel, 1977; Markus, 1977) can be related to the cross-situational con-
sistency issue. As noted by Bern and Allen (1974), our intuitions tell us that there are cross-situational consistencies in behavior, even though the research data do not tend to confirm this. Our process approach would interpret this as follows: (a) Personal data are processed using the self (e.g., Experiment 1). (b) The self induces people to view novel but self-relevant data as having been previ- ously experienced (Rogers et al., Note 1). (c) Therefore new personal data will appear to conform to expectation (i.e., fit into the scheme), which could produce a perception of consistency. This interpretation focuses upon the organizational and biasing aspects of the human information processor, which provides an alternate construction of these important data. Although the utility of this interpretation rests on further empirical tests, the amenability of such a model to direct ex- perimental scrutiny argues in its favor.
In summary, the present article offers data to suggest that self-reference is a very potent encoding device. The pattern of results indi- cates that the use of self during the encoding of adjectives produces as elaborate and inte- grated a memory trace as has been found using the present experimental paradigm. These data suggest the self is an extremely important aspect of the processing of per- sonal information. In the realm of human information processing it is difficult to con- ceive of an encoding device that carries more potential for the rich embellishment of stim- ulus input than does self-reference.
Reference Notes
1. Rogers, T. B., Rogers, P. J., & Kuiper, N. A. Recognition memory for personal adjectives: Some evidence for self-reference as an aspect of memory. Unpublished manuscript, University of Calgary, 1977.
2. Jackson, D. N. A threshold model for stylistic responding. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, September 1968.
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Received January 24, 1977 •
