The more "mental miles" traveled during daydreaming task, the greater one's susceptibility to false fame: further evidence in support of a contextual change account of the false fame effect.

The false fame effect occurs when previously encountered nonfamous names are later misidentified as famous because, although people no longer remember the circumstances in which the names were encountered, the names remain familiar and that familiarity is mistakenly attributed to fame. The present study examined whether shifting participants' internal context through autobiographical daydreaming would increase susceptibility to the false fame effect, and whether larger context shifts would produce greater memory distortions. Across two experiments, participants first studied a list of nonfamous names before completing a task designed to induce either a near or far shift in internal context. In Experiment 1, participants mentally reconstructed either their own home or their parents' home. In Experiment 2, they described either a recent domestic vacation or an international vacation. Control participants completed a reading task that did not encourage mental context change. Participants then studied a list of famous names and completed a fame judgment task. Across both experiments, participants who experienced a far context change made significantly more false fame judgments than those who experienced a near context change, who in turn made more false fame judgments than control participants. Moreover, across the near and far context-change conditions, the number of "mental miles" traveled during the daydreaming task was positively correlated with false fame judgments in both experiments. Thus, greater mental distance was associated with greater susceptibility to false fame. Signal detection analyses likewise revealed reduced discrimination between famous and nonfamous names following larger context shifts. Together, these findings demonstrate that greater internal contextual change increases susceptibility to the false fame effect, providing further support for a contextual change account.