Chapter 1. False Fame

1.1 Introduction

Jacoby and colleagues (1989) tested the ability of individuals to use their source memory to recall whether names that were familiar to them were familiar because the names were of famous people or because they had seen the names in a list in the recent past. The researchers demonstrated that individuals will often report that a name made familiar by presentation in the study portion of their experiment will become indistinguishable from actual famous names in the context of their experimental method. This provided evidence for an already-established experimental phenomenon, known as the sleeper effect, which has been observed in studies of persuasion in which information from a questionable source is initially rejected, but later influences decision-making (Greenwald et al, 1986).

Jacoby, L. L., Kelley, C., Brown, J., & Jasechko, J. (1989). Becoming famous overnight: limits on the ability to avoid unconscious influences of the past, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(3), 326-338.

Greenwald, A. G., Pratkanis, A. R., Leippe, M. R., & Baumgardner, M. H. (1986). Under what conditions does theory obstruct research progress? Psychological Review, 93, 216-229.

Dywan, J., & Jacoby, L. (1990). Effects of aging on source monitoring: differences in susceptibility to false fame, Psychology and Aging, 5(3), 379-387.

1.2 Experiment Setup

1.3 Instructions

You will need to press the space bar to start the experiment. At the beginning of each block, a fixation mark will appear. Please look at this mark. After a brief delay, a series of names will then be presented on the screen one at a time. Please pronounce each name out loud. You will be tested later on the accuracy of your pronunciation. Some names will appear only once, while others will appear multiple times.

1.4 Experiment

1.5 Results

Figure 1.3

1.6 Quiz