Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions

Abstract

A modified Asch (1951) conformity paradigm was used to study the impact of social influence on reality-monitoring decisions about new items. Subjects studied pictures of some objects and imagined others. In a later test phase, they judged whether items had been perceived in the study phase, had been imagined, or were new. Critically, for some items, the subjects were informed of a confederate's response before rendering a judgment. Although the confederate was always correct when they responded to old items, for new items, the confederate responded perceived, imagined, or new, or did not respond (baseline). In two experiments, we show that memory for new items was influenced by an erroneous response of the confederate. Social conformity was reduced by undermining the credibility of the confederate (Experiments 1A and 1B), and the confederate's influence was evident even after there was only a 20-min delay between study and test (Experiment 2), when the subjects were 87% accurate on new baseline items. These experiments reveal the power of social influence on realitymonitoring accuracy and confidence.

Conformidade entre testemunhas oculares: efeitos de falsas informações nos relatos criminais

“…Os paradigmas de conformidade usam tipicamente métodos que envolvem informações falsas inseridas em questionários de recordação (Hoffman, Granhag, Kwong See, & Loftus, 2001) ou em que o experimentador revela respostas de outras testemunhas fictícias, mas sempre sem a possibilidade do participante discutir tais informações com outras testemunhas (Luus & Wells, 1994). Novos estudos optaram por delineamentos com maior validade ecológica, com interações ao vivo de testemunhas oculares, por meio do uso de cenários mais realísticos (Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001 O uso de confederados, também, é um procedimento regular em muitos estudos sobre conformidade e influência social.…”

The costs and benefits of memory conformity

“…A host of studies have examined these social conformity effects on a variety of judgments (e.g., Baron, Vandello, & Brunsman, 1996;Hoffman, Granhag, Kwong See, & Loftus, 2001), and a growing number of studies have examined these effects on explicit recognition judgments (Allan & Gabbert, 2008;Axmacher, Gossen, Elger, & Fell, 2010;Gabbert, Memon, & Wright, 2007;Meade & Roediger, 2002;Reysen, 2005;Schneider & Watkins, 1996;Walther, Bless, Strack, Rackstraw, Wagner, and Werth 2002;Wright, Gabbert, Memon, & London, 2008;Wright, Self, & Justice, 2000). In general, the findings have shown that participants will shift their recognition memory decisions toward confederates' even when those confederates' reports are incorrect, a phenomenon termed "memory conformity."…”

Social processing improves recall performance

“…A number of recent articles have examined the impact of working with others on participants' memory performance (see, e.g., Basden, Reysen, & Basden, 2002;Betz, Skowronski, & Ostrom, 1996;Bless, Strack, & Walther, 2001;Gabbert, Memon, & Wright, 2006;Hoffman, Granhag, See, & Loftus, 2001;Meade & Roediger, 2002). Some of these studies have found that adding a social context to more traditional memory paradigms can lead to different results than those obtained using methods in which participants are asked to remember information on their own (e.g., Reysen, 2007).…”