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The self is a central construct that colors the way people per-ceive, think, and act (Banaji & Prentice, 1994; Baumeister, 1998). A wide assortment of psychological phenomena, from the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977) to self-serving biases (Bernstein, Stephan, & Davis, 1979), are variations on the basic theme that self-relevant information is processed differently than other types of social information. This article examines the boundary conditions and ecological validity of another such phenomenon—the self-reference effect in memory. The self-reference effect in memory refers to the finding that materials are remembered better if they have been encoded in a self-relevant way than if they have not (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). In the standard self-reference paradigm, partici-pants are exposed to personality traits (e.g., honest, shy). One group is asked to process the traits in self-relevant ways (“Does the word describe you?”). Other groups are asked to process the material in ways relevant to other people, semanti-cally, phonemically, or structurally. Numerous studies have established that self-referent encoding has an advantage over other types of encoding, with an average effect size of 0.50 (Symons & Johnson, 1997). In addition to personality traits, the self-relevance effect has been shown in memory for noun