Psychologists have generally investigated remembering as an intrapersonal phenomenon. However, everyday remembering often has a more social interpersonal flavour, particularly when two (or more) people jointly recall and discuss an event they have experienced or witnessed. This study examines quantitative differences between individual, dyadic and four-person group free and cued recall of a purposive social interaction -a fictional police interrogation -and contrasts the findings from two subject samples, police officers and students. Overall, groups outperformed individuals in terms of accuracy, made fewer evaluative comments about the interaction, but were also more prone to a misplaced overconfidence in inaccurate recall than were individuals. Several interesting differences in accuracy and the incidence of different types of error were found between police and student subjects. These findings are discussed in terms of differences in familiarity with task requirements and the type of interaction recalled between subject samples, and the ecological validity of the findings for each subject sample.
Psychological approaches to rememberingResearch on human memory has generally focused on explanations at the intrapersonal level, describing the processes involved in cognition. Such explanations take insufficient account of the social origins of remembering, the influence of the social purposes and contexts of recall, and the social (or collaborative) nature of much remembering. For example, Rogoff & Mistry (1985) found that, in the few studies that have investigated the development of mnemonic skills as a social/cultural phenomenon, children develop memory skills as a consequence of, and in order to participate more fully in, the social, cultural situations they experience, and that these skills are acquired thtough practical action and social interaction (Edwards & Middleton, 1988 ;Kail, 1984).It was Frederick Bartlett (1932) who first argued for the fundamentally social psychological nature of human memory. While acknowledging that remembering is * Requests for reprints. 74 N. K. Clark, G. M. Stephemon and B. H. Kniveton an intrapersonal phenomenon, he argued that many aspects of remembering are directly determined by social factors related to the effects of social contexts in general, and intragroup processes in particular, on the representation, comprehension and subsequent recall of discourse. He considered social context to be far more than a simple frame (Minsky, 1975) or script (Schank & Abelson, 1977) against which cognition and behaviour takes place. Social context was a necessary condition for social action rather than the backdrop for such action, and group membership per se was a moderating factor for both thought and behaviour, regardless of the presence or absence of other group members.Recently, Edwards & Middleton (1986, 1987) have suggested that there are two senses in which human memory is social. Firstly, we possess episodic memories for social events and relationships that we directly experien...
