change-of-standard effect

n. The change-of-standard effect refers to the way memory is distorted when a past judgment about some stimulus property is used in the present to recall that property without taking into account that the standard currently being used to decode the meaning of that earlier judgment is different from the standard originally used to encode the judgment. With rare exception, judgments involving trait-related constructs, such as friendly, intelligent, tall, and attractive, are comparative judgments that require some standard of comparison. For example, to judge that "Tom is friendly" is to judge that Tom is more friendly than some standard of friendliness one has in mind, such as the friendliness of your friends or the friendliness of people in general (the "average" person).

It is necessary to use standards not only to encode comparative judgments, but also to decode the meaning of those judgments. When trait-related judgments are decoded or comprehended, the position of the target along the dimension of judgment is interpreted as being away from the standard in the direction of the region anchored by the judgment. For example, the judgment, "Bob is short" means that Bob's position along the height dimension is away from the standard in the direction of the short region of the height dimension. But what height is actually inferred depends on what standard is used. Imagine that you attend a party where most of the guests are college volleyball players, and someone mentions that Bob, whom you have not met, is "short." Your inference about Bob's actual height will vary, depending on whether you use the immediate context of volleyball players as the standard for decoding the judgment or use people in general as the standard.

Some standard, therefore, must be used both to encode and to decode trait-related judgments. However, there is no assurance that the standard used to encode the judgment will be the same as the standard used to decode the judgment. This is true whether the encoder and the decoder are the same person or two different people. The change- of-standard effect concerns the case where the encoder and decoder are the same person at two different points in time - a person attempting to decode the referential meaning of an earlier judgment that he or she made. A common example of standards changing from the time of encoding to the time of decoding is when the standard individuals use to encode a target person's trait is determined by the context of other people with the target person at the time (e.g., the other volleyball players at the party), but the standard they use to decode the trait judgment is people in general. In the example of Bob, this could produce a memory of Bob as being shorter than average when he is actually only shorter than taller-than-average volleyball players. The change-of-standard effect can also occur because a standard itself can change over time, such as what one believes is "average." A version of this is using oneself as the standard, the reason adults often inaccurately remember the house they lived in briefly as a young child as being huge (it was huge compared to their size at the time). Finally, research has shown that the change- of-standard effect is robust and difficult to debias - the memory distortion occurs even when individuals are reminded of the different standard they used to make their initial judgment from the standard they are currently using to decode thatjudgment.

- ETH