Motivated Forgetting in Response to Social Identity Threat

Motivated forgetting is a psychological defense mechanism whereby people cope with threatening and unwanted memories by suppressing them from conscious-ness. A series of laboratory experiments investigate whether social identity threat can motivate people subsequently to forget identity-linked marketing promotions. To this effect, whereas social identity priming improves memory for identity-linked promotions, priming coupled with social identity threat (i.e., negative identity-related feedback) impairs memory. Importantly, this identity threat effect occurs only among people who identify strongly with their in-group and only for explicit memory. Implicit memory, in contrast, remains intact under threat. Additionally, the identity threat effect is eliminated (i.e., explicit memory is restored) if people affirm the threatened social identity, thereby mitigating the threat, prior to memory retrieval. Finally, the identity threat effect occurs only when automatic processes guide for-getting. When forgetting is guided by deliberate and controlled processes, the to-be-forgotten memories intrude into consciousness. In 1915, Sigmund Freud intrigued the world with a theoryof repression, which suggests that people protect them-selves against the psychological threat posed by traumatic events by burying memory for such events deep in the mind, where the memories lie dormant for weeks, years, or even a lifetime. Despite its intriguing qualities, Freud’s theory has faced numerous empirical challenges. Some research finds that so-called repressed memories often are false memories, reconstructed at the time of retrieval (Loftus 1993). Other work casts doubt on the ability to forget unwanted memories, suggesting instead that people are hypersensitive to the very thoughts they wish to suppress (Martin and Tesser 1996; Weg-