I can see myself enjoying that: Using imagery perspective to circumvent bias in self-perceptions of interest

People experience life satisfaction when pursuing activities that genuinely interest them. Unfortunately, cultural stereotypes (e.g., "science is not for girls") and preexisting self-beliefs can bias people's memories, thereby hindering their ability to identify the domains that they actually experience as interesting. The current experiments tested a novel method for circumventing this problem by manipulating visual imagery perspective as people recalled their experiences. Four experiments measured (or manipulated) participants' actual experience of interest as they completed a task; the experiments also measured (or manipulated) participants' self-beliefs about their interest in the domain. The experiments then manipulated imagery perspective as participants recalled their interest in the task. Prior research suggests that imagery from an actor's first-person perspective facilitates a bottom-up processing style, whereas imagery from an external third-person facilitates a top-down processing style (Libby & Eibach, 2011). Consistent with this account, across all 4 experiments, first-person imagery (vs. third-person) caused people's recall to be less biased by the top-down influence of their self-beliefs and better aligned with their past experienced interest. The final experiment demonstrated downstream consequences of these effects on female undergraduates' intentions to pursue future activities in a domain (STEM) that negative stereotypes typically might dissuade them from pursuing. Thus, the present results suggest that first-person imagery can be a useful tool to reduce the influence of biased self-beliefs, while increasing sensitivity to past bottom-up experiences during recall. Further, these results hold practical implications for reducing psychological barriers that can keep underrepresented individuals from pursuing interests in counterstereotypical domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).