Public and private self-consciousness and reality monitoring ability.

Abstract

How well one remembers information from the social environment will directly affect how well he or she can interact in that environment. Past research supports the notion that people with certain types of personality traits will be better able to interact within specific social contexts. A series of experiments was conducted to test the role that the private and public self-consciousness disposition may play in affecting subjects' abilities to recall the sources (internally-generated or externally-perceived) of memories--this ability is known as reality monitoring. It was predicted that subjects with dispositionally high or dispositionally low levels of private or public self-consciousness would show different degrees of reality monitoring ability, based on their use of different degrees of cognitive reflection. Although no reality monitoring differences were found between the two levels of self-consciousness, support for different types of read/generate effects were found for item-specific processing strategies vs. global processing strategies.