FlashReportMemory conformity for confidently recognized items: The power of social influence on memory reports
Highlights
► People sometimes change their memory reports to conform with another's report ► People conform more frequently if their partner is highly credible ► They also conform more when confidence in their own memory is low ► We manipulated the relative credibility of a participant and a confederate ► Even confidently held memories are subject to social influence in some situations
Section snippets
Participants and design
Fifty-seven White participants took part. The experiment followed a 2 (confederate: in-group vs. out-group) × 2 (face group: in-group vs. out-group) × 2 (trial type: critical vs. non-critical) × 2 (item type: old vs. new) mixed design, with repeated measures on the last three factors. Twenty-seven participants were randomly allocated to the in-group confederate condition.
Materials and apparatus
Eighty faces (40 White, 40 Chinese) were cropped to remove external features.2
Manipulation check
Most participants agreed/strongly agreed that people are generally better at recognizing in-group than out-group faces (80.7%) and that they were personally more accurate when recognizing in-group faces than out-group faces (84.2%).
Test 1 accuracy
To ensure that test 1 accuracy was above chance, mean accuracy (d′) for both groups of faces was compared to 0: accuracy exceeded chance for both in-group (M = 0.93, SD = 0.51), t(57) = 13.69, p < .001, and out-group faces (M = 0.49, SD = 0.39), t(57) = 9.63, p < .001. Accuracy for
Discussion
In line with previous research, we found that memory conformity occurs more frequently for items associated with weak internal evidence, and that the credibility of a partner plays an important role in the memory conformity effect. Generally, participants considered information from an external source systematically. If internal evidence was sufficiently strong (i.e., confidence was high), participants usually disregarded discrepant information. If internal evidence was weak (i.e., confidence
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by ARC Discovery Grants DP1093210 (to N. Brewer et al.) and DP1092507 (to C. Semmler et al.). We thank Alexa Hiley and Kevin Chen for acting as confederates in this study, and Serene Juan and Shu Yun Poh for their assistance in collecting pilot data.
References (23)
- et al.
I still think it was a banana: Memorable ‘lies’ and forgettable ‘truths’
Acta Psychologica
(2008) - et al.
The effects of conformity on recognition judgements for emotional stimuli
Acta Psychologica
(2010) - et al.
Relative – not absolute – judgments of credibility affect susceptibility to misinformation conveyed during discussion
Acta Psychologica
(2011) - et al.
I saw it for longer than you: The relationship between perceived encoding duration and memory conformity
Acta Psychologica
(2007) - Allan, K., Midjord, P., Martin, D., & Gabbert, F. (in press). Memory conformity and the perceived accuracy of self...
Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority
Psychological Monographs
(1956)- et al.
Absolut® memory distortions: Alcohol placebos influence the misinformation effect
Psychological Science
(2003) - et al.
Shared realities: Social influence and stimulus memory
Social Cognition
(1996) - et al.
Psychotropic placebos create resistance to the misinformation effect
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
(2007) - et al.
The CAS-PEAL large-scale Chinese face database and baseline evaluations
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Part A)
(2008)
Signal detection theory and psychophysics
Cited by (28)
Social contagion of memory and the role of self-initiated relative judgments
2021, Acta PsychologicaThe role of memory strength and task orientation in memory conformity
2019, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :In fact, Jaeger, Lauris, et al. (2012) have argued that participants “outsource” their low-confidence memories, such that they rely more on the confederate when their confidence is low, even if the confederate's accuracy is worse than their own. Thus, high-accuracy and high-confidence memories appear to be less subject to conformity than poor memory and lower confidence (but see Horry et al., 2012 for an exception). However, the direct evidence for memory strength as a moderating factor is actually scarce.
Social Contagion of Autobiographical Memories
2017, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and CognitionSocial influence and mental routes to the production of authentic false memories and inauthentic false memories
2017, Consciousness and CognitionCitation Excerpt :Numbers et al. (2014) also reported evidence indicating minimization of the acceptance process when an ostensible other person has weak memory for original material. False fact acceptance may also be especially likely when a participant’s own memory for the original stimulus is weak or non-existent (see Betz et al., 1996; Horry et al., 2012). This false fact acceptance idea is similar to processes described for attitude formation and change, which suggest that attitude change is especially likely when existing attitudes are weak (see Glasman & Albarracín, 2006).
Are valence and social avoidance associated with the memory conformity effect?
2012, Acta PsychologicaMemory distrust and suggestibility: A registered report
2024, Legal and Criminological Psychology
- 1
Present address: University of Tasmania, Australia.