Mj. Beers et al., INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES IN PERSON MEMORY - SELF-MONITORING AND THE RECALL OF CONSISTENT AND INCONSISTENT BEHAVIOR, Journal of social behavior and personality, 12(3), 1997, pp. 811-820
Individuals differ in the extent to which they monitor and control the
ir behaviors in social situations High (relative to low) self-monitors
are especially concerned with conveying a positive impression. Previo
us research has demonstrated that high self-monitors remember more of
the central/action-related derails of an observed event than do low se
lf-monitors. The present research extends this work by showing that no
t all action-related information is especially well remembered by high
self-monitors. Employing a paradigm used in studies of person memory,
we found that high (relative to low) self-monitors demonstrated enhan
ced recall for the expectancy-inconsistent, but not the expectancy-con
sistent behaviors of an observed other Additional data indicated that
higher self-monitoring tendencies were also associated with greater el
aboration of the observed other and his behavior and that this greater
elaboration was, in turn, partly responsible for high self-monitors'
better memory for inconsistent behaviors. We conclude that high self-m
onitors are particularly motivated to seek out and retain those behavi
ors of others that provide potentially new information about what thos
e individuals are like and how they might react in future situations.