Examples of Selective Retention
 1.  "We may hear a politician's speech and remember only those things with which we are in agreement.  At school, we may be having a disagreement with our study group members over the best way to write a report.  When the study group leader tells us to do something, we may only remember the directions that agree with our own perceptions of the way the report should be written.  At home, parents ask their children to do chores around the house.  Children have an uncanny ability to remember only the chores that are the easiest to the ones they want to do.  In essence, we selectively remember communication
(  )".

2.  "In one experiment, groups of pro-Communist and anti-Communist college students were exposed weekly for a period of five weeks to both a pro-Soviet Union and anti-Soviet Union message.  Their progress in learning the anti-Soviet Union passage is charted in the figure below.  Clearly, the anti-Communist group, for whom the message was compatible, learnt its content more rapidly.  In the second stage of the experiment, stretching over another five weeks, the two groups of students were tested weekly for their recall of the passage.  Here again, the group for whom the message was compatible retained more of the message over time.  Although not charted here, similar results were obtained for the pro-Soviet Union message.  As we expected, the compatible message was better learnt, and in line with the idea of selective retention, the compatible message also was better retained (  )".

Source of the figure: 
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