Accentuation effect

Accentuation effect occurs when a person, place, or thing is placed into a category and aspects of this person, place, or thing tend to match the category they are put in more than they actually match it. Memory of anything that can be categorized is subject to an accentuation effect in which the memory is distorted toward typical examples.

In the case of people, the accentuation effect is similar to stereotyping and social categorization in that when classified as part of a group, people's features seem to more closely match their classification rather than any individual differences they have.

Causes and effects

Accentuation effect within ethnicity and faces

Researchers Corneille, Huart, Becquart, and Bredart found that when participants looked at ethnically ambiguous faces, certain ethnic features that stood out caused participants to falsely remember the person more toward an ethnic category than they actually were. Researchers used Caucasian or North African faces, and morphed them to be either low, moderate, or high on stereotypical features. The faces that were moderately stereotypical of either a Caucasian or North African person were falsely recollected in memory as more Caucasian or North African than they actually were. This is evidence for how distortions in memory are due to stereotypical conceptions that are held about certain ethnicities (Corneille et al. 2004).

Accentuation effect within temperature estimates

A study at Brown University found accentuation effects happened when participants were asked to estimate average temperatures in days throughout the year. Typically, four days in a month were used, ie, September 2, 10, 18, and 28, and the average high and low temperatures were estimated for each day. Results of this study found that when estimating the temperature, there was more of a jump in temperature estimates between months as opposed to estimates within months. Even though the temperature rises and falls fairly steadily with each passing day through the year, participants assume there is more of a drop in temperature, for example, between August 25 and September 2 than there is between September 2 and September 10, based entirely on the idea that August is warmer than September. (Krueger & Clement 1994).

Real examples

One example that researchers presented was that after an Italian colleague returned from a two-week vacation in Italy, his friends noticed that his hair and eyes were lighter than they had remembered. This happened because his categorization as Italian caused them to remember him with darker hair and eyes than he actually had. Thus, while there was no actual change in his hair and eye color, their memory of his features had been shifted to match what the stereotype of an Italian looks like, rather than his actual appearance (Corneille et al. 2004).