The costs and benefits of memory conformity

Can you help me? Using others to offload cognition

One of the most ancient and widely used forms of cognitive offloading is the outsourcing of cognitive operations onto other humans. Here, we explore whether humans preferentially seek out and use information from more competent compared with less competent others in an ongoing cognitive task. Participants (N = 120) completed a novel computerised visuospatial working memory task where each trial required them to remember either one, five, or ten target locations and recall them after a brief delay. Next, participants watched two virtual people compete in a distinct memory game, where one performed relatively well, demonstrating a stronger memory, and the other performed relatively poorly, demonstrating a weaker memory. Finally, participants completed the initial memory task again, but this time, either the strong-memory person or the weak-memory person was available to help with recall on each trial. Our results showed that, through observation and without direct instruction, participants acquired beliefs about the virtual people's cognitive proficiencies and could readily draw upon these beliefs to inform offloading decisions. Participants were typically more likely to ask for help from the strong-memory person, and this tendency was independent from other factors known to drive cognitive offloading more generally, like task difficulty, unaided cognitive ability, and metacognitive confidence.

Whom to trust? Inferred source credibility and response borrowing in a memory task

We investigated whether people can discriminate between sources of information that are either credible or respond at random, based only on their own knowledge and the responses provided by these sources. In three experiments, participants were asked to judge the validity of trivia statements. Some statements were accompanied by true/false responses provided by either a credible source or a source whose responses were random. In Experiment 1, participants first saw a set of easy questions, which provided the basis for assessing the relative credibility of the sources, before responding to a set of difficult questions, where response borrowing was assessed. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants solved a test composed of difficult questions only, but only after studying the correct responses to all these questions. In Experiment 2, there was no delay between the study and test phases, whereas in Experiment 3, the delay was 24 hours. In all experiments, more participants explicitly identified the more credible source in the postexperimental questionnaire than misidentified the noninformative source as credible. However, differentiated response borrowing-borrowing more responses from the credible than the noninformative source-emerged only in Experiment 2. Therefore, people can often explicitly infer source credibility from the responses the sources provide. However, using these inferences to regulate response borrowing is relatively less likely and happens only under specific, favorable circumstances.

EXPRESS: Combining Refutations and Social Norms Increases Belief Change

Misinformed beliefs are difficult to change. Refutations that target false claims typically reduce false beliefs, but tend to be only partially effective. In this study, a social norming approach was explored to test whether provision of peer norms could provide an alternative or complementary approach to refutation. Three experiments investigated whether a descriptive norm-by itself or in combination with a refutation-could reduce the endorsement of worldview-congruent claims. Experiment 1 found that using a single point estimate to communicate a norm affected belief but had less impact than a refutation. Experiment 2 used a verbally-presented distribution of four values to communicate a norm, which was largely ineffective. Experiment 3 used a graphically-presented social norm with 25 values, which was found to be as effective at reducing claim belief as a refutation, with the combination of both interventions being most impactful. These results provide a proof of concept that normative information can aid in the debunking of false or equivocal claims, and suggests that theories of misinformation processing should take social factors into account.

In search of a Goldilocks zone for credible AI

If artificial intelligence (AI) is to help solve individual, societal and global problems, humans should neither underestimate nor overestimate its trustworthiness. Situated in-between these two extremes is an ideal 'Goldilocks' zone of credibility. But what will keep trust in this zone? We hypothesise that this role ultimately falls to the social cognition mechanisms which adaptively regulate conformity between humans. This novel hypothesis predicts that human-like functional biases in conformity should occur during interactions with AI. We examined multiple tests of this prediction using a collaborative remembering paradigm, where participants viewed household scenes for 30 s vs. 2 min, then saw 2-alternative forced-choice decisions about scene content originating either from AI- or human-sources. We manipulated the credibility of different sources (Experiment 1) and, from a single source, the estimated-likelihood (Experiment 2) and objective accuracy (Experiment 3) of specific decisions. As predicted, each manipulation produced functional biases for AI-sources mirroring those found for human-sources. Participants conformed more to higher credibility sources, and higher-likelihood or more objectively accurate decisions, becoming increasingly sensitive to source accuracy when their own capability was reduced. These findings support the hypothesised role of social cognition in regulating AI's influence, raising important implications and new directions for research on human-AI interaction.

Social contagion of memory and the role of self-initiated relative judgments

Two experiments examined the role of spontaneous relative judgments within the social contagion of memory paradigm (Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001). Participants viewed household scenes (for short or long durations) in collaboration with a confederate (with low, average, or superior memory ability) who falsely recalled incorrect items as having occurred in the scenes. Of interest was whether or not participants would spontaneously evaluate the state of their own memory relative to the state of the confederate's memory when remembering suggested information. Participant responses on a metacognitive questionnaire demonstrated that participants were aware of their own memory ability relative to the memory ability of their partner. Interestingly, this information influenced participants' remember responses on the recall test only when they felt their own memory was relatively poor. Participants make self-initiated, relative judgments of memory when working with others on a memory test, and these judgments are driven by metacognitive differences in remember responses. The results highlight the importance of metacognition in understanding relative judgments in social memory.

False reports of an accomplice in a crime scene: conformity effects on memory confidence and accuracy

Abstract The memory reports of a given individual may be altered by preceding memory reports of another individual, a phenomenon termed memory conformity. To investigate this phenomenon, 58 undergraduate students were separated in two groups which watched one of two slightly different movies of a crime scene (one included an accomplice). Subsequently, pairs containing one participant from each group discussed the movie, and then participants responded individually whether there was an accomplice in the scene. The frequency of false reports and their confidence for the presence/absence of the accomplice were analyzed. Only false reports of seeing an accomplice were produced (by 31% of those who saw no accomplice), and confidence were as high for these responses as for correct “no-accomplice” responses. The data is consistent with prior findings, and show that confidence on false reports can be high when involving “insertion” of elements to witnessed events.

Conformidade em Memória de Reconhecimento: Revisão Breve e Potenciais Direções de Pesquisa

Resumo Conformidade de memória é o fenômeno em que relatos de memória de uma pessoa são modificados após exposição aos relatos de outra pessoa. Estudos sobre conformidade de memória são importantes tanto no âmbito puro quanto aplicado, especialmente quando os estímulos são carregados emocionalmente. No entanto, estudos de conformidade de memória com estímulos emocionais ainda são escassos. Além disso, os poucos estudos sobre o tema apresentam resultados contraditórios. Nesta revisão, apresentamos um breve resumo de pesquisas sobre conformidade de memória em tarefas de reconhecimento e avaliamos o papel moderador da emocionalidade na conformidade. Sugerimos como possível direção de pesquisas futuras a avaliação de duas variáveis, intervalo de retenção e distintividade dos estímulos, que podem ser cruciais para elucidar as inconsistências empíricas.

Feedback and Direction Sources Influence Navigation Decision Making on Experienced Routes

When navigating in a new environment, it is typical for people to resort to external guidance such as Global Positioning System (GPS), or people. However, in the real world, even though navigators have learned the route, they may still prefer to travel with external guidance. We explored how the availability of feedback and the source of external guidance affect navigation decision-making on experienced routes in the presence of external guidance. In three experiments, participants navigated a simulated route three times and then verbally confirmed that they had learned it. They then traveled the same route again, accompanied with no, correct, or incorrect direction guidance, which latter two were provided by a GPS (Experiment 1), a stranger (Experiment 2), or a friend (Experiment 3). Half of the participants received immediate feedback on their navigation decisions, while the other half without feedback did not know if they had selected the correct directions. Generally, without feedback, participants relied on external guidance, regardless of the direction sources. Results also showed that participants trusted the GPS the most, but performed best with their friends as a direction source. With feedback, participants did not show differences in performance between the correct and incorrect guidance conditions, indicating that feedback plays a critical role in evaluating the reliability of external guidance. Our findings suggest that incorrect guidance without any feedback might disturb navigation decision-making, which was further moderated by the perceived credibility of direction sources. We discuss these results within the context of navigation decision-making theory and consider implications for wayfinding behaviors as a social activity.

The role of memory strength and task orientation in memory conformity

Memory conformity occurs when one's memory reports are influenced by the memories of others. These experiments tested whether the conformity effect would be moderated by memory strength and task orientation. In Experiments 1 and 3 we manipulated levels of processing to test whether conformity effects are greater when memory is poor relative to when it is good. In Experiment 2 we tested the role of participants' orientation to the test, as either a test-taker or a grader, as well as the effects of levels of processing. Conformity effects were found in all experiments, but were not eliminated when memory was strong. Conformity was influenced by the participant's task orientation, with a smaller effect for graders than test-takers. These data indicate that strong memory will not always buffer the conformity effect, but a relatively simple role change can moderate the effect.

An Evolutionary Approach to the Study of Collaborative Remembering?

Hope and Gabbert (2008) and Jay and colleagues (in press) show us that collaborative remembering, in certain contexts, may result in incomplete and less accurate memories. Here, I will discuss the evolutionary origins of this behavior, linking it to phenomena such as social contagion, conformity, and social learning, which are highly adaptive and widespread across non-human taxa.

Memory at the Sharp End: The Costs of Remembering With Others in Forensic Contexts

In many applied contexts where accurate and reliable information informs operational decision-making, emergency response resource allocation, efficient investigation, judicial process, and, ultimately, the delivery of justice, the costs of unfettered conversational remembering can be high. To date, research has demonstrated that conversations between co-witnesses in the immediate aftermath of witnessed events and co-witness retellings of witnessed events often impair both the quality and quantity of information reported subsequently. Given the largely negative impact of conversational remembering on the recall of both individual witnesses and groups of witnesses in this context, this review explores the reasons why these costs occur, the conditions under which costs are exacerbated, and how, in practical terms, the costs can be reduced in order to maximize the accuracy and completeness of witness accounts.

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking

Storytelling represents a key element in the creation and propagation of culture. Three main accounts of the adaptive function of storytelling include (a) manipulating the behavior of the audience to enhance the fitness of the narrator, (b) transmitting survival‐relevant information while avoiding the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information, and (c) maintaining social bonds or group‐level cooperation. We assess the substantial evidence collected in experimental and ethnographic studies for each account. These accounts do not always appeal to the specific features of storytelling above and beyond language use in general. We propose that the specific adaptive value of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling the collaborative development of previously acquired skills and knowledge, but also promoting social cohesion by strengthening intragroup identity and clarifying intergroup relations.

Bietti, Tilston and Bangerter take an evolutionary approach towards memory transmission and storytelling, arguing that storytelling plays a central role in the creation and transmission of cultural information. They suggest that storytelling is a vehicle to transmit survival‐related information that helps to avoid the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information and contributes to the maintenance of social bonds and group‐level cooperation. Furthermore, Bietti et al. argue that, going beyond storytelling’s individualist role of manipulating the audience to enhance fitness of the narrator, that these adaptive functions of storytelling may well be assigned to other forms of language use besides narration (e.g., instructional discourse and argumentation). Based on this evidence, Bietti and colleagues claim that the specific adaptive function of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling collective sensemaking.

Social Transmission of False Memory in Small Groups and Large Networks

Sharing information and memories is a key feature of social interactions, making social contexts important for developing and transmitting accurate memories and also false memories. False memory transmission can have wide-ranging effects, including shaping personal memories of individuals as well as collective memories of a network of people. This paper reviews a collection of key findings and explanations in cognitive research on the transmission of false memories in small groups. It also reviews the emerging experimental work on larger networks and collective false memories. Given the reconstructive nature of memory, the abundance of misinformation in everyday life, and the variety of social structures in which people interact, an understanding of transmission of false memories has both scientific and societal implications.

The effects of co-witness discussion on confidence and precision in eyewitness memory reports

We examined the influence of co-witness discussion on the metacognitive regulation of memory reports. Participants (N = 92) watched a crime video. Later, a confederate confidently agreed with (gave confirming feedback), disagreed with (gave disconfirming feedback), or gave no feedback (control) regarding participants' answers to questions about the video. Participants who received disconfirming feedback reported fewer fine-grain details than participants in the confirming and control conditions on a subsequent, individual recall test for a different question set. Unexpectedly, this decrease in fine-grain reporting was not accompanied by a decrease in participants' confidence in the accuracy of their fine-grain responses. These results indicate that receiving social comparative feedback about one's memory performance can affect rememberers' metamemorial control decisions, and potentially decrease the level of detail they volunteer in later memory reports. Further research is needed to assess whether these results replicate under different experimental conditions, and to explore the effects of social influences on metamemory.

How Gullible are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science

A long tradition of scholarship, from ancient Greece to Marxism or some contemporary social psychology, portrays humans as strongly gullible—wont to accept harmful messages by being unduly deferent. However, if humans are reasonably well adapted, they should not be strongly gullible: they should be vigilant toward communicated information. Evidence from experimental psychology reveals that humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. They check the plausibility of messages against their background beliefs, calibrate their trust as a function of the source's competence and benevolence, and critically evaluate arguments offered to them. Even if humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance, an adaptive lag might render them gullible in the face of new challenges, from clever marketing to omnipresent propaganda. I review evidence from different cultural domains often taken as proof of strong gullibility: religion, demagoguery, propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, erroneous medical beliefs, and rumors. Converging evidence reveals that communication is much less influential than often believed—that religious proselytizing, propaganda, advertising, and so forth are generally not very effective at changing people's minds. Beliefs that lead to costly behavior are even less likely to be accepted. Finally, it is also argued that most cases of acceptance of misguided communicated information do not stem from undue deference, but from a fit between the communicated information and the audience's preexisting beliefs.

Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memory

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential, 'autonoetic' character. Here, we offer a comprehensive characterization of episodic memory in representational terms, and propose a novel functional account on this basis. We argue that episodic memory should be understood as a distinctive epistemic attitude taken towards an event simulation. On this view, episodic memory has a metarepresentational format and should not be equated with beliefs about the past. Instead, empirical findings suggest that the contents of human episodic memory are often constructed in the service of the explicit justification of such beliefs. Existing accounts of episodic memory function that have focused on explaining its constructive character through its role in 'future-oriented mental time travel' neither do justice to its capacity to ground veridical beliefs about the past nor to its representational format. We provide an account of the metarepresentational structure of episodic memory in terms of its role in communicative interaction. The generative nature of recollection allows us to represent and communicate the reasons for why we hold certain beliefs about the past. In this process, autonoesis corresponds to the capacity to determine when and how to assert epistemic authority in making claims about the past. A domain where such claims are indispensable are human social engagements. Such engagements commonly require the justification of entitlements and obligations, which is often possible only by explicit reference to specific past events.

Conflict and metacognitive control: the mismatch-monitoring hypothesis of how others' knowledge states affect recall

Information about others' success in remembering is frequently available. For example, students taking an exam may assess its difficulty by monitoring when others turn in their exams. In two experiments, we investigated how rememberers use this information to guide recall. Participants studied paired associates, some semantically related (and thus easier to retrieve) and some unrelated (and thus harder). During a subsequent cued recall test, participants viewed fictive information about an opponent's accuracy on each item. In Experiment 1, participants responded to each cue once before seeing the opponent's performance and once afterwards. Participants reconsidered their responses least often when the opponent's accuracy matched the item difficulty (easy items the opponent recalled, hard items the opponent forgot) and most often when the opponent's accuracy and the item difficulty mismatched. When participants responded only after seeing the opponent's performance (Experiment 2), the same mismatch conditions that led to reconsideration even produced superior recall. These results suggest that rememberers monitor whether others' knowledge states accord or conflict with their own experience, and that this information shifts how they interrogate their memory and what they recall.

Discounting input from older adults: the role of age salience on partner age effects in the social contagion of memory

Three experiments examined the impact of partner age on the magnitude of socially suggested false memories. Young participants recalled household scenes in collaboration with an implied young or older adult partner who intentionally recalled false items. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with only the age of their partner (low age-salience context); in Experiment 2, participants were presented with the age of their partner along with a photograph and biographical information about their partner (high age-salience context); in Experiment 3, age salience was varied within the same experiment. Across experiments, participants in both the low age-salience and high age-salience contexts incorporated their partners' misleading suggestions into their own subsequent recall and recognition reports, thus demonstrating social contagion with implied partners. Importantly, the effect of partner age differed across conditions. Participants in the high age-salience context were less likely to incorporate misleading suggestions from older adult partners than from young adult partners, but participants in the low age-salience context were equally likely to incorporate suggestions from young and older adult partners. Participants discount the memory of older adult partners only when age is highly salient.

They can take a hint: Older adults effectively integrate memory cues during recognition

Adaptively biasing recognition judgments in light of environmental cues improves net accuracy. Based on previous work suggesting that strategically shifting biases on a trial-wise basis should be cognitively demanding, the authors predicted that older adults would not achieve the same accuracy benefits from environmental cues as the young. However, despite showing clear declines in cognitive control as indexed by complex span, older adults demonstrated similar accuracy gains and similar alterations of response probabilities with cues of 75% reliability (Experiment 1) and more complex cues spanning 3 levels of reliability (Experiment 2). Despite preserved gains in accuracy, older adults clearly demonstrated disproportionate slowing that was specific to trials in which cues were invalid. This slowing may reflect impairments in behavioral inhibition that could impinge upon accuracy were responding increasingly sped and future work manipulating response speed and measures of inhibition may yield further insights.

Social influences on adaptive criterion learning

People adaptively shift decision criteria when given biased feedback encouraging specific types of errors. Given that work on this topic has been conducted in nonsocial contexts, we extended the literature by examining adaptive criterion learning in both social and nonsocial contexts. Specifically, we compared potential differences in criterion shifting given performance feedback from social sources varying in reliability and from a nonsocial source. Participants became lax when given false positive feedback for false alarms, and became conservative when given false positive feedback for misses, replicating prior work. In terms of a social influence on adaptive criterion learning, people became more lax in response style over time if feedback was provided by a nonsocial source or by a social source meant to be perceived as unreliable and low-achieving. In contrast, people adopted a more conservative response style over time if performance feedback came from a high-achieving and reliable source. Awareness that a reliable and high-achieving person had not provided their feedback reduced the tendency to become more conservative, relative to those unaware of the source manipulation. Because teaching and learning often occur in a social context, these findings may have important implications for many scenarios in which people fine-tune their behaviors, given cues from others.

Socio-sexuality and episodic memory function in women: further evidence of an adaptive "mating mode"

The functionalist memory perspective predicts that information of adaptive value may trigger specific processing modes. It was recently demonstrated that women's memory is sensitive to cues of male sexual dimorphism (i.e., masculinity) that convey information of adaptive value for mate choice because they signal health and genetic quality, as well as personality traits important in relationship contexts. Here, we show that individual differences in women's mating strategies predict the effect of facial masculinity cues upon memory, strengthening the case for functional design within memory. Using the revised socio-sexual orientation inventory, Experiment 1 demonstrates that women pursuing a short-term, uncommitted mating strategy have enhanced source memory for men with exaggerated versus reduced masculine facial features, an effect that reverses in women who favor long-term committed relationships. The reversal in the direction of the effect indicates that it does not reflect the sex typicality of male faces per se. The same pattern occurred within women's source memory for women's faces, implying that the memory bias does not reflect the perceived attractiveness of faces per se. In Experiment 2, we reran the experiment using men's faces to establish the reliability of the core finding and replicated Experiment 1's results. Masculinity cues may therefore trigger a specific mode within women's episodic memory. We discuss why this mode may be triggered by female faces and its possible role in mate choice. In so doing, we draw upon the encoding specificity principle and the idea that episodic memory limits the scope of stereotypical inferences about male behavior.

Speaking order predicts memory conformity after accounting for exposure to misinformation

When people discuss their experiences, they can later report seeing things that they never saw, simply because they heard about those things in the discussion. One factor that may contribute to this effect is the order in which people speak; some research has investigated this issue, but it remains unclear whether a relationship exists between memory conformity and speaking order. We explored this question using data from five previous memory conformity experiments. The results provide evidence of an association between speaking order and memory conformity, such that people who spoke first in a discussion were misled less often than people who did not. These results build on previous research by demonstrating that the association could not have been caused by differences in opportunities to be misled. We could not draw conclusions about causality from the exploratory analyses, but ruled out several simple explanations of the results, and considered a variety of social and cognitive mechanisms that might account for the association. Further investigation will be required to tease apart the possible mechanisms that underlie the relationship between speaking order and memory conformity.

Explicit mentalizing mechanisms and their adaptive role in memory conformity

Memory conformity occurs when an individual endorses what other individuals remember about past events. Research on memory conformity is currently dominated by a 'forensic' perspective, which views the phenomenon as inherently undesirable. This is because conformity not only distorts the accuracy of an individual's memory, but also produces false corroboration between individuals, effects that act to undermine criminal justice systems. There is growing awareness, however, that memory conformity may be interpreted more generally as an adaptive social behavior regulated by explicit mentalizing mechanisms. Here, we provide novel evidence in support of this emerging alternative theoretical perspective. We carried out a memory conformity experiment which revealed that explicit belief-simulation (i.e. using one's own beliefs to model what other people believe) systematically biases conformity towards like-minded individuals, even when there is no objective evidence that they have a more accurate memory than dissimilar individuals. We suggest that this bias is functional, i.e. adaptive, to the extent that it fosters trust, and hence cooperation, between in-group versus out-group individuals. We conclude that memory conformity is, in more fundamental terms, a highly desirable product of explicit mentalizing mechanisms that promote adaptive forms of social learning and cooperation.

Metacognitive awareness and adaptive recognition biases

Prior literature has primarily focused on the negative influences of misleading external sources on memory judgments. This study investigated whether participants can capitalize on generally reliable recommendations in order to improve their net performance; the focus was on potential roles for metacognitive monitoring (i.e., knowledge about one's own memory reliability) and performance feedback. In Experiment 1, participants received explicit external recommendations (Likely Old or Likely New) that were 75% valid during recognition tests containing deeply and shallowly encoded materials. In Experiment 2, participants received recommendations of differing validity (65% and 85%). Discrimination improved across both experiments when external recommendations were present versus absent. This improvement was influenced by metacognitive monitoring ability measured in the absence of recommendations. Thus, effective incorporation of external recommendations depended in part on how sensitive observers were to gradations of their internal evidence when recommendations were absent. Finally, corrective feedback did not improve participants' ability to use external recommendations, suggesting that metacognitive monitoring ability during recognition is not easily improved via feedback.