Date of Award

Summer 8-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

Program/Concentration

Psychology

Committee Director

Ivan K. Ash

Committee Member

Mary L. Still

Committee Member

Christina M. Rodriguez

Abstract

Minoritized groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community, receive many harmful and destructive stereotypes from others. These negative views affect minorities because when people are recalling a memory, they fill in the gaps with general information that they know. When the schematic information is not accurate, people tend to remember information that was not originally presented; this is known as a false memory. When people accurately recall a memory, but not the source of the memory, it is known as a source monitoring error.

The current study investigated whether stereotype-consistent information leads to more false memories and source monitoring errors as well as more negative social categorization judgments. Moreover, the relationship between prejudice against LGBTQ+ people and memory errors regarding members of the community were analyzed. In this study, participants were presented stereotypical descriptive items describing a fabricated person who was randomly assigned a gender and sexual orientation. Participants performed a memory recognition task in order to analyze the presence of false memories and source monitoring errors. Participants were also given a measure of social categorization, where they rated the warmth and competency of the individual, as well as a measure of hate towards the LGBTQ+ community.

Results indicate a greater number of source monitoring errors for information regarding homosexual males. There was not a significant relationship between LGBTQ+ hate and memory errors for the homosexual male target. There was, however, a positive relationship between LGBTQ+ hate and memory errors for the homosexual female target. Lastly, there was no relationship between warmth and competency judgments and memory errors for the homosexual targets. Implications, limitations, and future research modifications are discussed.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/8px9-ns95

ISBN

9798193216384

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