• Sarah J Barber, Ruthanna Gordon, and Nancy Franklin.
• Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794-2500, USA. sarah.barber@sunysb.edu
• Mem Cognit. 2009 Jun 1; 37 (4): 434-46.

AbstractWhen making source attributions, people tend to attribute desirable statements to reliable sources and undesirable statements to unreliable sources, a phenomenon known as the wishful thinking effect (Gordon, Franklin, & Beck, 2005). In the present study, we examined the influence of wishful thinking on source monitoring for self-relevant information. On one hand, wishful thinking is expected, because self-relevant desires are presumably strong. However, self-relevance is known to confer a memory advantage and may thus provide protection from desire-based biases. In Experiment 1, source memory for self-relevant information was contrasted against source memory for information relevant to others and for neutral information. Results indicated that self-relevant information was affected by wishful thinking and was remembered more accurately than was other information. Experiment 2 showed that the magnitude of the self-relevant wishful thinking effect did not increase with a delay.

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