Putting congeniality effects into context: Investigating the role of context in attitude memory using multiple paradigms

In three experiments, we evaluated remembering and intentional forgetting of attitude statements that were either congruent or incongruent with participants’ own political attitudes. In Experiment 1, significant directed forgetting was obtained for incongruent statements, but not for congruent statements. In addition, in the remember group, recall was better for incongruent statements than congruent statements. To explain these findings, we propose a contextual competition at retrieval hypothesis, according to which incongruent statements become more strongly associated with their episodic context during encoding than do congruent statements. At the time of retrieval, incongruent statements compete with congruent statements due to the greater amount of contextual information stored in their memory trace. We tested this hypothesis in Experiment 2 by studying free recall of congruent and incongruent statements in a mixed-pure list design. In Experiment 3, memory for incongruent and congruent statements was tested under recognition test conditions that varied in terms of how much direct retrieval of contextual details they required. Overall, the results supported the contextual competition hypothesis, and they indicate the importance of context strength in both the remembering and intentional forgetting of attitude information.

► Remembering and directed forgetting of congruent and incongruent attitude statements.
► Mixed list memory and forgetting greater for incongruent items than congruent items.
► List strength effect confirmed by anti-congeniality effect on mixed but not pure lists.
► Anti-congeniality in recognition only when test conditions required retrieval of contextual details.
► Results support the proposed contextual competition at retrieval hypothesis.