Collaborative remembering reduces suggestibility: A study with the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale

Why collaboration reduces suggestibility: The role of source-monitoring processes and retrieval strategies

“…Taken together, the results reported by Rossi-Arnaud et al (2019, 2020 provide solid evidence in support of the conclusion that collaborative remembering reduces suggestibility. However, two different factors might potentially account for these findings.…”

“…Then, after a short interval (1 h) or a longer delay (1 week), all the pairs were administered a yes/no recognition task in which the misleading statements either matched the questions presented in the confabulation phase or were completely new. As in the Rossi-Arnaud et al (2019) study, the main outcome was that collaborative pairs were less likely to provide false assents to misleading statements in the final recognition task; furthermore, positive effects of collaboration were shown regardless of whether participants had given confabulated responses to the statements in the previous phase.…”

“…Based on this evidence, the present study aimed at determining whether the same mechanism could account for the reduction in the number of false assents to misleading questions observed by Rossi-Arnaud et al (2019). That is, the primary contribution of our experiment was that, by recording the conversations within collaborative groups and by computing inclusive scores, we aimed at determining whether the positive effects of collaboration could be accounted for by the mutual use of error-checking strategies.…”

“…Two recent studies expanded this line of research by examining the effects of collaborative retrieval on suggestibility (Rossi-Arnaud et al, 2019;Rossi-Arnaud et al, 2020) here defined as the degree to which people come to accept misleading information communicated during formal questioning (Gudjonsson & Clark, 1986;Mastroberardino & Marucci, 2013). Specifically, Rossi-Arnaud et al (2019) used the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS: Gudjonsson, 1984Gudjonsson, , 1997 to compare the performance of collaborative and nominal dyads. In the GSS, participants listen to a story, provide immediate and delayed (after 50 min) free recalls, and answer a series of misleading questions before and after having received a negative feedback on their performance.…”

“…In the GSS, participants listen to a story, provide immediate and delayed (after 50 min) free recalls, and answer a series of misleading questions before and after having received a negative feedback on their performance. Two main results arose from the Rossi-Arnaud et al (2019) study. First, collaborative dyads remembered the same amount of correct story elements as nominal dyads in the immediate and delayed recall tasks, indicating that the classical effect of collaborative inhibition was not obtained.…”