Roediger, H. L., Meade, M. L., & Bergman, E. T. (2001). Social contagion of memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 365-371.

People often try to remember information in groups. We are, after all, social animals. In such settings, each of the group members feed off of one another, in an attempt to remember a shared past event. Visiting old friends and reliving shared past events is a good example of this social form of remembering. Social remembering is very different from memory paradigms typically employed by Cognitive Psychologists. In Cognitive paradigms individuals learn information in isolations and are later tested in isolation.

Method

Stimulus Presentation

The present experiment was an attempt to study the more social aspects of remembering. In the present study, two people, one actual participant and one confederate, were presented with visual stimuli depicting several different scenes. For half of the participants the visual stimuli was presented for 15 seconds. For the remaining participants the visual stimuli was presented for 60 seconds. Thus, rate of presentation was manipulated between participants.  

Group Memory Test

Later, both participants were jointly tested for what they could remember. During this group testing, some of the answers produced by the confederate had not been presented in the scenes. Half of these wrong answers were highly associated with the scene that they were attributed (e.g., toaster, kitchen scene). The remaining wrong answers were less associated with the scene that they were attributed (oven mitts, kitchen scene). Thus, the level of association between the false answer and the scene was manipulated within participants. The final manipulation was whether or not the confederate provided false answers for a scene. The confederate only provided false answers for half of the scenes, which scenes had false answer given for them was counterbalanced across participants. 

Private Memory Test

Finally, the actual participant privately completed a free recall memory test for the scenes. The critical dependent measure was the rate at which participants falsely reported the wrong answers given by the confederate in their free recall answers. Remember / know responses were provided for each of participant's free recall responses.

Results

As can be seen in Table 1, Participants falsely reported more of the false answers that were provided by the confederate that were highly associated with the scene. Also participants falsely reported more of the false answers provided by the confederate when the rate of presentation at study was 15 seconds per slide opposed to 60 seconds per slide.  

As can be seen in Table 2 there were significant difference in the rates at which participants attributed the feelings of remember and know to their falsely recalled answers. Participants were more likely to classify their false responses as known opposed to remembered. Not surprisingly, there were more remember responses given for contagion information than for control information.

Discussion

A typical source monitoring explanation is given for the results obtained in the present experiment. These results of course are relevant to the observation that some false memories generated in group therapy sessions have details that were provided by other members of the group.