The costs and benefits of memory conformity

Abstract

We examined the influence of external recommendations on memory attributions. In two experiments, participants were led to believe that they were viewing the responses of two prior students to the same memoranda they were currently judging. However, they were not informed of the reliability of these fictive sources of cues or provided with performance feedback as testing proceeded. Experiment 1 demonstrated improvement in the presence of reliable source cues (75% valid), as compared to uncued recognition, whereas performance was unaltered in the presence of random cues provided by an unreliable source (50% valid). Critically, participants did not ignore the unreliable source, but instead appeared to restrict cue use from both sources to low-confidence trials on which internal evidence was highly unreliable. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants continued to treat an unreliable source as potentially informative even when it was predominantly incorrect (25% valid), highlighting severe limitations in the ability to adequately discount unreliable or deceptive sources of memory cues. Thus, under anonymous source conditions, observers appear to use a low-confidence outsourcing strategy, wherein they restrict reliance on external cues to situations of low confidence.

Memory, metamemory, and social cues: Between conformity and resistance.

“…Strikingly, when this proportion was 100% -that is, all details provided by the confederate were incorrect -the magnitude of the social contagion effect was indistinguishable from a condition when the proportion of errors was 33%. Thus, just as in Jaeger, Lauris, et al (2012), participants in the study of Numbers et al conformed to the same extent to sources that were largely reliable and grossly unreliable. Importantly, this indiscriminate conformity was observed in a paradigm differing in a number of dimensions from the study of Jaeger, Lauris, et al, including a direct social interaction with another person during the collaborative recall phase.…”

“…This was a departure from the procedure of Jaeger, Lauris, et al (2012), in which double-cue trials (with cues from both sources) were present in addition to single-cue trials.…”

“…In the original paradigm, participants were asked to respond whether a given item is old or new. 2 In the present paradigm, participants were asked to 2 Jaeger, Lauris, et al (2012) used a confidence scale for responding, ranging from 1 (sure new) to 6 (sure old) and then analyzed results by deriving 'new' responses from judgments 1-3 and 'old' responses from judgments MEMORY, METAMEMORY, AND SOCIAL CUES 13 respond 'old', 'new' or 'don't know' to each test item. The introduction of the 'don't know' option meant that participants needed to make a metamemory decision for each of their responses.…”

“…This study revealed that participants conformed to the same extent to reliable and unreliable sources. In 1 Jaeger, Lauris, et al (2012) used also double-cued trials in which contrasting cues from both sources were presented. As the present study is not concerned with contrasting cues, we do not discuss those results here.…”

“…A striking example of this comes from a recent study by Jaeger, Lauris, Selmeczy, and Dobbins (2012). In this study, participants were asked to memorize lists of words and later perform a recognition test in which study words were intermixed with novel lures.…”