Thinking backward: some curable and incurable consequences of cognitive busyness

Social interaction imposes a variety of attentional demands on those who attempt it. Such cognitively busy persons often fail to use contextual information to correct the impressions they form of others. The 4 experiments reported here examined the corrigibility of this effect. Although formerly busy perceivers were able to correct their mistaken impressions retroactively (Experiment 1), such retroactive correction was not inevitable (Experiment 2). In addition, when perceivers were able to correct their original impressions retroactively, they were still unable to correct subseque nt inferences that had been biased by those original impressions (Experiments 3 and 4). As such, perceivers were occasionally able to overcome the primary, but not the sucsidiary, effects of cognitive busyness. The results are discussed in terms of the metastasis of false knowledge.

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