Social anxiety moderates memory conformity in adolescents

Abstract

When two people view the same event and later try to remember it together, what one person says affects what the other person reports. A model is presented which predicts that this memory conformity effect will be moderated, in different ways, by two components of social anxiety. People with higher fear of negative evaluation should be more influenced by their peers than others, but those with higher social anxiety related to avoiding social situations may be less influenced by their peers than others. Pairs of adolescent-aged participants took part in a face recognition study. For each trial one person responded and then the next person responded. The effect of what the first person said on the second person's response was measured; the size of the effect was moderated by the social anxiety measures as predicted by the model. This is the first study showing the relationship between social anxiety and memory suggestibility.

Memory conformity and the perceived accuracy of self versus other

“…Complementing this work in which the relative credibility of participants' partner was manipulated, in a parallel series of studies, it has been shown that increases and decreases in the accuracy of one's own memory can systematically reduce or elevate, respectively, the extent to which one is willing to conform to another person's judgments (e.g., Baron et al, 1996;Roediger et al, 2001; see also Tousignant, Hall, & Loftus, 1986). These two complementary lines of work have informed Wright and colleagues' recent proposal (Wright, London, & Waechter, 2010;Wright & Schwartz, 2010) that conformity motivated by the desire to maintain an accurate memory-that is, deriving from an informational social influence (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004)-results from a combination of beliefs about our own memory and our partner's memory. Here, we provide a novel and direct test of this view by integrating the two strands of work on partner credibility and one's own accuracy within a single approach.…”

Memory Conformity: Actors and Bystanders

“…People want to be liked and sometimes conform to be accepted by others. Using this conceptualization of conformity, Wright, London and Waechter (2010) found that normative influence affects memory conformity. They found that two components of social anxiety (fear of negative evaluation and social avoidance) moderated the memory conformity effect.…”

“…Wright, London and Waechter (2010) proposed a model that encompasses what researchers believe to be the important elements in memory conformity research, but it lacks quantitative predictability. The model uses the cost of disagreeing, cost of making an error, belief in other's memory and belief in one's memory to make predictions about the probability of conforming.…”

Conformity effects in memory for actions

“…These processes are driven by the basic psychological desire to feel accepted by others (normative influence) and by the desire to be correct (informational influence). Figure 1 shows these two sets within a memory conformity context (Wright, London, & Waechter, 2010).…”