Detriments and Benefits in Collaborative Memory of Social Information: Insight From Gender Stereotypes

Abstract

Stereotypes are well documented to elicit stereotype-consistent effects in individual memory. Additionally, collaborative memory can result in detrimental collaborative inhibition and 2 beneficial effects: error pruning and postcollaborative memory benefit. We examined whether the stereotype-consistent effect can be expanded to the context of collaborative memory. Additionally, we examined whether the effects observed in collaborative memory also apply to the memory for social stereotypes. This study applied positive, neutral, and negative gender stereotype words and engaged participants in an individual study and 2 recall tests. Recall 1 was completed either individually or collaboratively, whereas Recall 2 was always performed individually. The recall was to remember both the studied words and the speaker's gender associated with them, testing both item memory and source memory. (a) We expanded the stereotype-consistent effect to both ongoing and postcollaboration situations, affecting both item memory and source memory. Additionally, in the word gender–speaker inconsistent situations, there was an involuntary bias to remember the sources of own-gender stimuli. (b) We extended the detrimental and beneficial effects of collaboration into the domain of gender stereotypes. The detrimental effect of collaborative inhibition was sensitive to both memory tasks and the emotional valence of stimuli. This indicates that when dealing with social stimuli, the disruption of preferential strategies is not confined. The beneficial effects acted as a function of the memory task, providing evidence for the conditional application of the mechanisms of the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis and the processes of dual process theory in social memory processing.