When Instructions to Forget Become Instructions to Remember

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of situational context (i.e., pragmatics) on instructions to forget. Confederates presented behaviors of an experimenter (who was not present) to subjects. All subjects received a set of evaluatively positive behaviors, and some subjects received an evaluatively negative set. Some subjects receiving negative behaviors were instructed to forget them because they should not have been mentioned or were incorrect. Despite the forget instruction, subjects' impression judgments of the experimenter were affected by the to-be-forgotten behaviors. Moreover, the form of the forget instruction affected judgments: Negative behaviors that should not have been mentioned were used more than negative behaviors that were incorrect. The form of the forget instruction, however, did not affect recall of the negative behaviors. The implications of these results for instructions to forget in different communicative situations are discussed.