Subjective Importance as a Cue for Self-Reference

We investigated whether people’s judgments of self-reference could be influenced by cues of importance. Our investigation builds on evidence that information related to the self is processed in specialized ways and that implicit attributions affect how stimuli are interpreted. We hypothesized that the more important a trait descriptor was, the more likely participants would be to misremember it as having been presented in a self-referential manner. This hypothesis was tested using a source-memory task; subjective ratings of importance served as predictors of accuracy. In two experiments, logistic multilevel analyses supported our predictions, indicating that people use cues of importance when deciding if stimuli are self-referential. The results show that people do not rely solely on valence when making self-referential judgments; importance also can bias self-referential attributions. These findings have implications for social and autobiographical memory, including how people may assign responsibility for jointly produced actions.