Transforming fiction into fact: Flawed reality—monitoring of socially sensitive person—information

In the present experiment we examined reality monitoring for socially sensitive and non-sensitive information relating to prejudice (negative and positive beliefs about an ethnic minority). At study, participants either imagined or perceived negative or positive attributes in connection with photographs of target individuals that clearly varied in ethnicity (non-western or western). At test, the task was to determine if they had imagined or perceived an attribute in connection with each target person from the study phase. We predicted that participants high in motivation to control prejudice would avoid responding that they had generated (imagined) socially sensitive information (i.e. negative attributes in connection with non-western targets), and instead respond that such information was presented. Results confirmed this prediction: Motivation to control prejudice was connected with a bias towards responding "perceived" (instead of "imagined") when source-decisions were made in regard to the socially sensitive combination non-western + negative. This pattern appeared for both perceived and imagined combinations.