The influence of implicit motives on memory processes

Four studies tested the hypothesis that agentic and communal motives act as a channel for new knowledge and are linked to specific ways of organizing information that facilitate its accessibility. In Study 1, agentic and communal participants read an agentic or a communal vignette consisting of differentiated and integrated statements, performed a distraction task, then completed written recall and recognition tasks. Agentics recalled and recognized more differentiation in the agentic story; communals recalled and recognized more integration in the communal story. A computerized replication with randomized recognition items (Study 2) found the same pattern of recognition results. Studies 3 and 4 used implicit motive primes and found similar results in both written and computerized recognition tasks. These ways of organizing information have powerful implications for the encoding of autobiographical knowledge and its long-term organization.