Research Article
And Remember the Truth That Once Was Spoken Knowledge of Having Disclosed Private Information to a Stranger Is Retrieved Automatically Franziska Schreckenbach , Klaus Rothermund, and Nicolas Koranyi Department of General Psychology II, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
Abstract: Whenever individuals reveal personally relevant information to a stranger, they have to remember their self-disclosure for future interactions. Relying on instance-based theories of automaticity, we hypothesized that knowledge about having revealed private information to someone unfamiliar is retrieved automatically whenever this person is encountered again. In two studies, participants were orally interviewed by two different persons and instructed to be honest to one of them and to lie to the other. This instruction was either related to the identity of the interviewers (Experiment 1) or their gender (Experiment 2). Afterward, the target words honest and dishonest had to be identified in a categorization task in which pictures of the interviewers and of unknown persons served as task-irrelevant prime stimuli. In line with the hypothesis, results revealed congruence effects, indicating faster identification of the target word honest following the picture of a person whom one had told the truth. Keywords: self-disclosure, lying, automatic processes, instance-based learning
Typically, individuals entrust intimate details about the incidents in their lives, their thoughts and feelings only to very few people in their social environment (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998; Dindia, Fitzpatrick, & Kenny, 1997). These confidants are usually close friends or family members, like our partner, our siblings, or our parents. These social bonds are based on feelings of intimacy and a long history of mutual trust and reciprocity (Neyer, Wrzus, Wagner, & Lang, 2011). However, on some occasions, individuals may feel the urge to talk to someone about a personal issue, for instance, because none of their intimates is available or because they want to talk about a secret they want to hide away from these very persons. If such a situation arises, people sometimes confide in a total stranger, which is known as the “stranger on a train” phenomenon (Rubin, 1975). For instance, this might happen when meeting an interesting person at a party and immediately starting an intense discussion about a personally relevant topic, or when simply sitting alone with another person in a train coach while having the need to talk about a major problem. Experimental Psychology (2019), 66(1), 12–22 https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000427
Whenever individuals have spoken openly and frankly to an unfamiliar person, they are well advised to remember that they had been honest to better regulate future interactions with this person, who has become an insider. For instance, the insider might use the private information to one’s disadvantage, and it is therefore important to have an eye on him or her. Alternatively, the insider might also be more open or more loyal to us, due to the fact that we have been as open before. Finally, when meeting the person again and acting according to the default mode (e.g., withholding personally relevant information), the person might be irritated and might even identify the incorrectness of one’s statements due to the incongruence with the original conversation. In the present research, we want to test the idea that remembering one’s self-disclosure toward someone unfamiliar is achieved by an automatic mechanism that comes into effect as soon as one has confided in an unknown person. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that a previously unknown conversation partner and the fact that one has been honest are bound together, forming an episodic unit that is stored in memory. When the person is encountered again, the information about having been honest is automatically retrieved from the stored episode. The broader theoretical framework behind this idea is provided by instance-based or episodic theories of memory Ó 2019 Hogrefe Publishing
