Glossary
Self-Relevance Effect
What is the self-relevance effect?
Information is self-relevant when it connects with your own experiences, interests, or sense of who you are. The self-relevance effect is often discussed through the self-reference effect: better memory for information considered in relation to yourself than for information processed through certain comparison tasks.
How it is studied
A common experiment asks whether adjectives describe you, then tests your memory for them. Other participants might judge the words' meanings or whether they describe another person.
Symons and Johnson's meta-analysis found an overall memory advantage for self-reference. Its size depended on how much the comparison task encouraged people to organize the material and connect it with other information.
Personal relevance in learning and communication
Connecting new material with what you know about yourself may help you remember it. But a message that feels personally relevant is not the same as the self-reference instruction used in an experiment.
If you apply the idea to a lesson or advertisement, test the actual result. Remembering a message, agreeing with it, and acting on it are different outcomes.