Self-Relevance Effect
A tendency for people to encode information differently depending on the level on which they are implicated in the information. When people are asked to remember information when it is related in some way to themselves, the recall rate can be improved.
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Origin
T.B. Rogers, N.A. Kuiper, and W.S. Kirker of the University of Calgary established the effect in a 1977 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They extended Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart's 1972 "levels of processing" framework, showing that judging whether a trait describes oneself produces even deeper memory encoding than semantic analysis — because the self acts as an unusually rich and well-organised long-term memory schema.
Updated February 22, 2026