Mem Cogn (2011) 39:1033–1041 The goal of our pilot study was to examine whether people would think of a strong stereotype when reading the survival instruction. Thus, we asked participants to read the original survival instruction and write down the type of person they were thinking of when reading the scenario, mentioning the specific (personality or physical) characteristics associated with a person in this survival situation. These descriptions were used for the construction of a survival stereotype instruction that we employed in Experiment 2 (see below). In Experiment 1, we compared the standard survival condition with two stereotype conditions (a professor or an elderly person), as well as with the standard moving condition. Our reason for including a professor and elderly person stereotype was twofold. To begin with, previous stereotype activation studies have demonstrated that these stereotypes have robust memory effects (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998; Levy, 1996). Second, we included these stereotypes because we were interested in stereotypes that could lead to better (professor) or worse (elderly person) memory performance. Thus, Experiment 1 explored whether a survival recall effect would still emerge when pitting the survival scenario against a strong stereotype (professor) known to enhance memory performance. In the professor stereotype condition, participants had to imagine that they were a professor specialized in the functioning of memory, while participants in the elderly person stereotype condition were instructed to imagine being an elderly person with Alzheimer’s disease. As is typical for survival recall studies, participants subsequently were presented with words that had to be rated for their relevance to the imagined scenario and, finally, were given a surprise free recall test. We predicted that the professor stereotype group would match the recall performance ofthe standard survival group and that both conditions would also lead to higher recall levels than would the standard moving scenario. We expectedthat the newly introduced elderlyperson stereotype condition would result in the worst recall performance. In Experiment 2, the standard survival condition was contrasted with a survival stereotype and the standard moving condition. In the survival-stereotype condition, participants were asked to imagine being a person who was mentally and physically strong enough to survive. Our prediction was that this survival-stereotype condition would match the survival group and lead to higher recall than would the moving condition. Pilot study Method Participants Undergraduate participants (N = 15, Mage = 26.13, SD = 5.71; 3 men) were involved in this pilot study. 1035 They participated voluntarily, and all were students from the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University. Procedure Participants were asked to read the standard survival instructions,which were taken from Nairne et al. (2007) and translated into Dutch. Next, they had to write down the type of person they were thinking of when reading the scenario, as well as the specific (personality or physical) characteristics associated with a person in this survival situation. This task lasted for 5 min. The survival instruction read as follows: In this task, we would like you to imagine that you are stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land, without any basic materials. Over the next few months, you’ll need to find steady supplies of food and water and protect yourself from preda- tors. We are going to show you some words, and we would like you to rate how relevant each word would be in this survival condition. Some of the words may be relevant and others not-it’s up to you to decide. Results and discussion We defined positive traits as traits that might be advanta- geous for physical and psychological well-being and negative traits as traits that could adversely affect physical and psychological well-being. Two independent raters scored the traits. Overall, when describing the type of person, participants mentioned positive traits (n = 118; e.g., intelligent, creative, healthy) more often than negative traits (n = 1; i.e.,lonely; interrater reliability, κ = .80). So, in other words, in this pilot study, participants described, in total, 118 positive traits and only 1 negative trait.When we looked at the percentages of specific words (e.g., healthy) that participants generated in their descriptions, we found the following. The most frequently mentioned associations written down by the participants—that is, healthy (15%), intelligent (20%), good memory (14%), physically strong (20%), much energy (10%)—together made up 79% of the descriptions. We found that when people were asked which characteristics they thought of when reading the survival instruction, positive traits predominated in participants’ descriptions. As such, these positive traits could result in superior memory performance. To explore whether the survival instruction would outper- form often-used stereotypes (Experiment 1) or a new survival stereotype instruction (Experiment 2), we con- ducted two experiments.