speakers reshape listeners' memories through at least two discrete means:(1) social contagion and (2) socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (ss-RIF). Three experiments explored how social relationships between speaker and listener moderate these conversational effects, focusing specifically on two speaker characteristics, expertise and trustworthiness. We examined their effect on ss-RIF and contrasted, within-subjects, their effects on both ss-RIF and the previously studied social contagion. Experiments 1 and 2 explored the effects of perceived expertise; Experiment 3 explored trust. We found (1) that speakers who were perceived as experts induced greater levels of social contagion and lower levels of ss-RIF than non-expert speakers, and (2) that, likewise, trust in the speaker had similar mnemonic consequences, in that neutral speakers induced more social contagion and less ss-RIF than untrustworthy speakers. These findings suggest that how speakers shape listeners' memories depends on the social dynamic that exists between speaker and listener.
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