EFFECTS OF MULTIPLE TASK DEMANDS UPON MEMORY FOR INFORMATION ABOUT SOCIAL-GROUPS

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that memory for trait information describing social groups would be more congruent with prevailing expectations about those groups when group impressions are formed under conditions in which the perceiver is required to engage in multiple concurrent tasks. In Experiment 1, subjects read behaviors describing members of one, two, or four social groups with instructions to form impressions of all of the groups. The recall advantage for expectancy-incongruent over expectancy-congruent behaviors decreased as the number of groups increased. The number of behaviors describing each group did not affect the type of behaviors recalled. In Experiment 2, all subjects formed impressions of two social groups, but one-half of the subjects were required to simultaneously listen and attend to a distracting news broadcast. Nondistracted subjects recalled a greater proportion of incongruent than congruent behaviors, whereas distracted subjects recalled a greater proportion of congruent than incongruent behaviors. Results are discussed in terms of the conditions under which group stereotypes may be formed and maintained through preferential memory for expectancy-congruent information. © 1991.