Sanitioso, R., Kunda, Z., & Fong, G. T. (1990). Motivated recruitment of autobiographical memories. Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 59(2), 229-241.
We hypothesized that people motivated to believe that they possess a given trait search for autobiographical memories that reflect that trait, so as to justify their desired self-view. We led subjects to believe that either extraversion or introversion was desirable, and obtained convergent evidence from open-ended memory-listing tasks as well as from reaction time (RT) tasks measuring the speed with which memories could be generated ...