Person Memory the Processing of Consistent and Inconsistent Person Information

Recall for behaviors that were either consistent or inconsistent with a previously presented set of uniform trait adjectives was studied. Similar to Hastie and Kumar (1979), recall for inconsistent behaviors was better when they constituted the minority of behavior descriptions. However, the reverse was found when consistent behaviors formed the minority set. The majority set, rather than the minority set, of behavior descriptions determined impression ratings of the fictional character. These results were discussed in terms of the effects of trait information as compared to behavioral information on person memory.