Norman R. Brown

When Profit Equals Price: Consumer Confusion About Donation Amounts in Cause-Related Marketing

A series of five studies examine potential consumer confusion associated with the “percentage of profit” wording often used to describe cause-related marketing in which money is donated to a charity each time a consumer makes a purchase. The initial four studies demonstrate that (1) expressing the donation amount as a percentage of profit leads to widespread confusion and near universal overestimation of the amount being donated, (2) even consumers who have had formal accounting training are susceptible to this bias, (3) participant motivation in an experimental setting cannot account for these results, and (4) people report higher attitudes toward a company and express stronger purchase intentions as a function of the percentage value of the donation but not as a function of whether it is a percentage of profit or price. The authors conclude with a study that explores several potential affirmative disclosures for the percentage-of-profit problem.

Estimating number of lifetime sexual partners: Men and women do it differently

On surveys, men report two to four times as many lifetime opposite‐sex sexual partners (SPs) as women. However, these estimates should be equivalent because each new sexual partner for a man is also a new sexual partner for a woman. The source of this discrepancy was investigated in this study. Participants reported number of lifetime and past‐year SPs and estimation strategies. The pattern of lifetime estimates replicated. The lifetime protocols indicated that people used different estimation strategies, that people who used the same strategy produced similar estimates, that some strategies were associated with large estimates and others with small ones, and that men were more likely to use the former and women the latter. No sex differences in estimates or strategies were apparent in the past‐year protocols. Our findings suggest that discrepant lifetime partner reports occur because men and women rely on different estimation strategies, not because they intentionally misrepresent their sexual histories.

Estimation strategies and the judgment of event frequency.

Processes underlying judgments of absolute event frequency were investigated in 3 experiments. In all 3, word pairs consisting of a target (a category label, e.g., CITY) and context (a category exemplar, e.g., London) were presented in a differentor same-context study list. In the different-context condition, each target was paired with a new context on each presentation; in the same-context condition, a target always appeared with the same context. Verbal protocols (Experiment 1) and response times (Experiments 2 and 3) indicate that multiple estimation strategies were used and that strategy selection was related to memory contents. In particular, different-context participants often enumerated, and same-context participants did not. Also, because range information only affected same-context estimates (Experiment 3), it appears that a numerical conversion process was necessary when nonenumeration strategies were used.

Event Clusters: An Organization of Personal Events in Autobiographical Memory

The present study employed a method called event cuing to investigate the organization of autobiographical memory. The unique feature of this method is the use of event descriptions as retrieval cues. Participants first recalled a set of personal events. Next, they responded to each of these cuing events by retrieving a second related personal event (the cued event). Subsequently, relations between cued and cuing events were coded by the participants, and all events were dated and rated for importance. Results indicate that memorable personal events, regardless of age or importance, are often embedded in event clusters; that events organized by these clusters, like episodes in a story, are often causally related, temporally proximate, and similar in content; and that narrative processes may not be necessary for the formation of event clusters, though subsequent narration may affect their contents and structure.

Event Cueing, Event Clusters, and the Temporal Distribution of Autobiographical Memories

SUMMARY This article provides an overview of a series of event-cueingexperiments conducted to investigate how autobiographical memory is organized at the event level. In these experiments, participants first generate a set of personal events (cueing events) and then respond to each by retrieving a second event memory (the cued event). Subsequently, relations between cued and cueing events are coded, and all events are dated and rated for importance. This approach has produced two general findings. First, we have found that event memories are often embedded in narrative-like event clusters. Second, across experiments, we have observed large, systematic diAerences in the temporal distribution of the event pairs. In this article, we review evidence concerning the organizational importance of event clusters. We then examine the temporal distributions obtained from three representative experiments and account for the marked diAerences in these distributions by considering how task demands, memory structures, and response strategies aAect retrieval from autobiographical memory. #1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Living in History How War, Terrorism, and Natural Disaster Affect the Organization of Autobiographical Memory

Memories of war, terrorism, and natural disaster play a critical role in the construction of group identity and the persistence of group conflict. Here, we argue that personal memory and knowledge of the collective past become entwined only when public events have a direct, forceful, and prolonged impact on a population. Support for this position comes from a cross-national study in which participants thought aloud as they dated mundane autobiographical events. We found that Bosnians often mentioned their civil war and that Izmit Turks made frequent reference to the 1999 earthquake in their country. In contrast, public events were rarely mentioned by Serbs, Montenegrins, Ankara Turks, Canadians, Danes, or Israelis. Surprisingly, historical references were absent from (post–September 11) protocols collected in New York City and elsewhere in the United States. Taken together, these findings indicate that it is personal significance, not historical importance, that determines whether public events play a role in organizing autobiographical memory.

Context Memory and the Selection of Frequency Estimation Strategies

When people estimate event frequency, they sometimes retrieve and count event instances. This study demonstrates a direct relation between the use of these enumeration-based strategies and the contents of memory. In 3 experiments, participants studied target-context word pairs, estimated presentation frequency for target words, and recalled context words. Study time, target-context relatedness, and study-phase instructions were manipulated, producing large differences in memory for context words. When context memory was best, estimation time increased sharply with presentation frequency, and the steepness of this estimation time-presentation frequency function decreased with context memory. These results indicate that enumeration was common only when context memory was good, that encoding factors determine how frequency is represented, and that the contents of memory restrict strategy selection.

False Memories and Semantic Lexicon Arrangement

A description of semantic lexicon arrangement is a central goal in examinations of language processing. There are a number of ways in which this description has been cast and a host of different mechanisms in place for providing operational descriptions (e.g., feature sharing, category membership, associations, and co-occurrences). We first review two views of the structure of semantic space and then describe an experiment that attempts to adjudicate between these two views. The use of a false memory paradigm provides us with evidence that supports the notion that the semantic lexicon is arranged more by association than by categories or features.

On the prevalence of directly retrieved autobiographical memories.

In this study, we used process measures to understand how people recall autobiographical memories in response to different word cues. In Experiment 1, participants provided verbal protocols when cued by object and emotion words. Participants also reported whether memories had come directly to mind. The self-reports and independent ratings of the verbal protocols indicated that directly recalled memories are much faster and more frequent than generated memories and are more prevalent when cued by objects than emotions. Experiment 2 replicated these results without protocols to eliminate any demand characteristics or output interference associated with the protocol method. In Experiment 3, we obtained converging results using a different method for assessing retrieval strategies by asking participants to assess the amount of information required to retrieve memories. The greater proportion of fast direct retrievals when memories are cued by objects accounts for reaction time differences between object and emotion cues, and not the commonly accepted explanation based on ease of retrieval. We argue for a dual-strategies approach that disputes generation as the canonical form of autobiographical memory retrieval and discuss the implication of these findings for the representation of personal events in autobiographical memory.

Intergenerational Transmission of the Reminiscence Bump and Biographical Conflict Knowledge

In the study reported here, we investigated intergenerational transmission of life stories in two groups of young adults: a conflict group and a nonconflict group. Only participants in the conflict group had parents who lived through violent political upheaval. All participants recalled and dated 10 important events from one of their parents’ lives. There were three main findings. First, both groups produced sets of events that displayed a reminiscence bump related to the parent’s estimated age at the time of the event. Second, the majority of the events in both groups were transitions that were perceived to have exerted a significant psychological and material impact on a parent’s life. Third, in the conflict group, 25% of recalled events were conflict related. This finding indicates that historical conflict knowledge is passed from one generation to the next and that it is understood to have had a personally relevant, life-altering effect. Moreover, the findings suggest that transitional impact and perceived importance help determine which events children will remember from a parent’s life.