Subjective Importance as a Cue for Self-Reference.

We investigated whether people's judgments of self-reference could be influenced by cues of importance. Our investigation builds on evidence that information related to the self is processed in specialized ways and that implicit attributions affect how stimuli are interpreted. We hypothesized that the more important a trait descriptor was, the more likely participants would be to misremember it as having been presented in a self-referential manner.