How what we tell becomes what we know: Listener effects on speakers’ long‐term memory for events

Pasupathi, Monisha; Stallworth, Lisa M.; Murdoch, Kyle

doi:10.1080/01638539809545035

Cited by 160 publications

(171 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…One reason to study storytelling is that it draws much-needed attention to the reciprocal workings of personality traits in social interaction, since only through listener cooperation can a story be launched and completed (Ochs & Capps, 2001). Also, an array of studies have found that how one tells a story and how the listener responds can impact not only memory for the story, but also physical and emotional well-being (e.g., King & Raspin, 2004;Pasupathi, Stallworth, & Murdoch, 1998;Pennebaker, 1997). At present, very little is known about longer-term outcomes of different kinds of storytelling processes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

Thorne

Korobov

Morgan

2007

Journal of Research in Personality

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This narrative study examined the process of personal storytelling between college-age friends who were similarly introverted or extraverted. Participants were 19 introverted and 20 extraverted samesex pairs (49 percent female) who had been friends for an average of 18 months. Stories emerged spontaneously during 10-minute catch-up conversations. Extraverted friends more often told stories that changed the topic, and more often co-constructed story plots. Introverted friends more often told stories that were embedded in a developing theme, and constructed story plots solo. With regard to content, extraverted friends told stories about romance more so than introverted friends, whose stories more often concerned family/hometown, and older events. The findings suggest that the traits of extraversion and introversion channel the identity-making process. Keywordsintroversion; extraversion; friendship; stories; identity; narrative; discourse; traits; conversation One cannot grasp the most profound logic of the social world unless one becomes immersed in the specificity of an empirical reality (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 271) With the advent of narrative psychology (Bruner, 1990), the concept of personality has expanded beyond the domain of traits, such as extraversion, to encompass identity, or the sense that people make of their lives through telling stories (McAdams, 2001). This expansion of the concept of personality to include life stories has enhanced the degree to which personality psychology attends to the whole person (McAdams, 1995), but the expansion has not been easy. A notable difficulty in connecting traits and life stories is that traits tend to be construed as genetic endowments, and life stories as psychosocial constructions (McAdams, 2001). However, it is now widely recognized that traits such as extraversion, while genetically based (e.g., Plomin, Chipuer, & Loehlin, 1990), become developmentally elaborated through psychosocial processes (Caspi, 1998).The present study builds on the idea that traits help to channel the development of other domains of personality (McLean & Pasupathi, 2006;Winter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, & Duncan, 1998). We investigated this channeling by exploring how people actively construct or "do" personality in everyday life (Cantor, 1990). A performative approach to the development of personality traits has been well-articulated by Caspi (1998), whose model of developmental Address correspondence to: Avril Thorne, University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Psychology, 277 Social Sciences 2, Santa Cruz, CA 95064,, E-mail: avril@ucsc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, an...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

Thorne

Korobov

Morgan

2007

Journal of Research in Personality

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“…This has been described as memory conformity (Gabbert et al, 2003;Wright et al, 2000) and as social contagion of memory (Meade & Roediger, 2002;Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001). Studies have shown that memory conformity can occur for autobiographical memories (e.g., Pasupathi, Stallworth, & Murdoch, 1998), as well as for episodic memories for either neutral or simulated crime events (e.g., Marsh, Tversky, & Hutson, 2005;Roediger et al, 2001). Although the effects of memory conformity are often without consequence, when they occur in an eyewitness situation, there can be serious implications.…”

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confidence: 94%

Memory conformity: Disentangling the steps toward influence during a discussion

Gabbert

Memon

Wright

2006

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

139

124

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When two people see the same event and discuss it, one person's memory report can influence what the other person subsequently claims to remember. We refer to this as memory conformity. In the present article, two factors underlying the memory conformity effect are investigated. First, are there any characteristics of the dialogue that predict memory conformity? Second, is memory conformity differentially affected when information is encountered that omits, adds to, or contradicts originally encoded items? Participants were tested in pairs. The two members of each pair encoded slightly different versions of complex scenes and discussed them prior to an individual free recall test. The discussions were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed. Our most striking finding was that the witness initiating the discussion was most likely to influence the other witness's memory report. Furthermore, witnesses were most likely to be influenced when an additional (previously unseen) item of information was encountered in the discussion.

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“…These manipulations may still involve some deceit, but they allow all partners to act authentically in the moment. For example, rather than instructing a confederate addressee to act inattentively (Jacobs & Garnham, 2007;Pasupathi, Stallworth, & Murdoch, 1998), naive addressees can be secretly preoccupied with a second task Kuhlen & Brennan, 2010). Even conformity to obviously incorrect perceptual judgments, as famously manipulated through the use of confederates in Asch's (1955) experiment, may be triggered by means of manipulating the perceptions of naive interacting partners by having them surreptitiously view different stimuli than those viewed by the subjects being tested (Mori & Arai, 2010).…”

Section: Implications and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language in dialogue: when confederates might be hazardous to your data

2012

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Experiments that aim to model language processing in spoken dialogue contexts often use confederates as speakers or addressees. However, the decision of whether to use a confederate, and of precisely how to deploy one, is shaped by researchers' explicit theories and implicit assumptions about the nature of dialogue. When can a confederate fulfill the role of conversational partner without changing the nature of the dialogue itself? We survey the benefits and risks of using confederates in studies of language in dialogue contexts, identifying four concerns that appear to guide how confederates are deployed. We then discuss several studies that have addressed these concerns differently-and, in some cases, have found different results. We conclude with recommendations for how to weigh the benefits and risks of using experimental confederates in dialogue studies: Confederates are best used when an experimental hypothesis concerns responses to unusual behaviors or low-frequency linguistic forms and when the experimental task calls for the confederate partner to take the initiative as speaker. Confederates can be especially risky in the addressee role, especially if their nonverbal behavior is uncontrolled and if they know more than is warranted by the experimental task.

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How what we tell becomes what we know: Listener effects on speakers’ long‐term memory for events

Abstract: 1998) How what we tell becomes what we know: Listener effects on speakers' long-term memory for events, Discourse Processes, 26:1, 1-25,

Cited by 160 publications

References 28 publications

Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

Memory conformity: Disentangling the steps toward influence during a discussion

Language in dialogue: when confederates might be hazardous to your data

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