And Remember the Truth That Once Was Spoken

Abstract

Abstract. Whenever individuals reveal personally relevant information to a stranger, they have to remember their self-disclosure for future interactions. Relying on instance-based theories of automaticity, we hypothesized that knowledge about having revealed private information to someone unfamiliar is retrieved automatically whenever this person is encountered again. In two studies, participants were orally interviewed by two different persons and instructed to be honest to one of them and to lie to the other. This instruction was either related to the identity of the interviewers (Experiment 1) or their gender (Experiment 2). Afterward, the target words honest and dishonest had to be identified in a categorization task in which pictures of the interviewers and of unknown persons served as task-irrelevant prime stimuli. In line with the hypothesis, results revealed congruence effects, indicating faster identification of the target word honest following the picture of a person whom one had told the truth.