From Conversations to Digital Communication: The Mnemonic Consequences of Consuming and Producing Information via Social Media

Abstract

Social media has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous means by which individuals curate, share, and communicate information with their friends, family, and the world at large. Indeed, 90% of the American adolescents are active social media users, as well as 65% of American adults (Perrin, 2015; see also Duggan & Brenner, 2013). Despite this, psychologists are only beginning to understand the mnemonic consequences associated with social media use. In this article, we will distill this nascent literature by focusing on two primary factors: the type of information (personal vs. public) and the role (producer vs. consumer) individuals play when engaging with social media. In particular, we will highlight research examining induced forgetting for personal information as well as false memories and truthiness for public information. We will end by providing some tentative conclusions and a discussion of areas in need of additional research that will provide a more holistic understanding of the mnemonic consequences associated with social media use.

Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related Misinformation on Social Media

“…Although sociology and psychology pioneered research to understand rumour (Allport and Postman, 1947;Bartlett, 1932;Kirkpatrick, 1932), psychologists are only beginning to study the implications of the explosion in internet use (Stone and Wang, 2018). While we conclude from the co-citation analysis that studies on misinformation in health cover a wide range of disciplines, there is a marked lack of interdisciplinary research.…”

#foodie: Implications of interacting with social media for memory

“…Consistent with the present results are findings that sharing personal memories on social media platforms improves memory for memories that were shared compared with those that were not shared (Wang, Lee, & Hou, 2016;see Stone & Wang, 2019, for discussion). One issue that Stone and Wang (2019) raised is that information that persons choose to share may be inherently more memorable. We note that in the present research, participants did not choose what to comment on; yet, we similarly observed a benefit to memory for engaging with the images.…”

Storytelling as adaptive collective sensemaking

“…Memory conformity occurs when one person's memory report about an event can influence what another person subsequently claims to remember about the same event (Gabbert, Memon, & Wright, 2006) and may lead to mixing of individual episodic memories (based on first-hand experience) with vicarious episodic memories (recollections of events that happened to other people; Pillemer, Steiner, Kuwabara, Thomsen, & Svob, 2015). Social memory biases in the transmission of information include memory conformity (Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003;Hope & Gabbert, 2018;Jaeger, Lauris, Slemeczy, & Dobbins, 2012;Meade & Roediger, 2002;Roediger & McDermott, 2011), socially shared-induced forgetting-increased forgetting of non-mentioned information related to what is mentioned in conversation relative to unrelated information that is not mentioned in conversation (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007;Stone, Barnier, Sutton, & Hirst, 2010, 2013Stone & Wang, 2018) -or the preferential retention of stereotype-consistent information over repeated transmission (Allport & Postman, 1947;Bangerter, 2000b;Lyons & Kashima, 2003, 2006Maswood & Rajaram, 2018). Social memory biases may lead to the emergence of collective memories (Hirst, Yamashiro, & Coman, 2018).…”