Abstract
It is argued that high mnemonic performance demonstrated in the ideal-self reference task did not unequivocally show that richness and organization of knowledge in the ideal self were responsible for performance. Accordingly, this study used goal-evaluation task, in which the participants classified each trait into either “want to be” or “not want to be” category. In this way, richness and organization of knowledge in the ideal and “feared selves” were compared. In Experiment 1, recall performance under goal evaluation condition was compared with that under actual and ideal self-reference conditions, and no significant difference was found. In Experiment 2, the taskfacilitation paradigm was used to test weather the goal evaluation task was performed be selectively accessing the two sets of self-knowledge. As a whole, results suggested that the task required selective access to both selves, and reflected richness and organization of knowledge for both ideal and feared selves.
