SELF-AWARENESS MEDIATES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SERIAL POSITION AND ITEM RELIABILITY

Knowles (1988) suggested that answering personality test items increases activation of the self-schema and that activation leads to more reliable item responses. This hypothesis was tested in this article by examining the effect of attentional focus on the correlation between serial position and item reliability. It was reasoned that inducing internal focus before test taking would lead to schema activation and limit the extent to which additional schema activation would occur due to item responding. Ss were induced to focus attention internally or externally before completing a measure of trait anxiety. The correlation between serial position and the reliability of test items was higher among externally focused Ss than among internally focused Ss. Further analyses suggested that this effect was due to decreasing within-subjects variance among the externally focused Ss. Implications for self-awareness theory and test theory are discussed.