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Memory conformity for confidently recognized items: The power of social influence on memory reports

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Abstract

Memory conformity occurs when one person's memory report influences another's. Memory conformity is more likely to occur when the information comes from a credible source, and when internal evidence is weak. Here, we investigate whether there are situational variations in how heavily participants weigh internal cues to accuracy when confronted with conflicting information from a partner. The results show that even confidently held memories are subject to influence from external sources, and that social influence is exaggerated when the source is seen to be highly credible.

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.

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    Present address: University of Tasmania, Australia.

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