The effects of conformity on recognition judgements

Abstract

Schneider and Watkins (1996) demonstrated that participants' recognition performance can be affected by responses generated by a confederate. However, it remains uncertain whether the confederate's responses actually change the participants' memories or whether participants simply attempt to conform to the confederate. The present experiments examined this issue by having participants complete a final individual recognition test following a recognition test in which the participants worked with a virtual confederate. The results suggest that responses from virtual confederates affect participants' performance in ways similar to actual confederates and that conforming to a virtual confederate's responses does appear to result in actual deficits in memory. More specifically, it impairs participants' ability to correctly recognise material presented earlier.

The costs and benefits of memory conformity

“…A host of studies have examined these social conformity effects on a variety of judgments (e.g., Baron, Vandello, & Brunsman, 1996;Hoffman, Granhag, Kwong See, & Loftus, 2001), and a growing number of studies have examined these effects on explicit recognition judgments (Allan & Gabbert, 2008;Axmacher, Gossen, Elger, & Fell, 2010;Gabbert, Memon, & Wright, 2007;Meade & Roediger, 2002;Reysen, 2005;Schneider & Watkins, 1996;Walther, Bless, Strack, Rackstraw, Wagner, and Werth 2002;Wright, Gabbert, Memon, & London, 2008;Wright, Self, & Justice, 2000). In general, the findings have shown that participants will shift their recognition memory decisions toward confederates' even when those confederates' reports are incorrect, a phenomenon termed "memory conformity."…”

“…The goal of the typical memory conformity experiment is to show how people are negatively influenced by external social sources (Allan & Gabbert, 2008;Axmacher et al, 2010;Meade & Roediger, 2002;Reysen, 2005;Schneider & Watkins, 1996;Walther et al, 2002;Wright et al, 2008Wright et al, , 2000. Given this, the manipulations usually promote situations in which the memory performance is impaired by misinformation purposefully given by confederates.…”

Reevaluating the potency of the memory conformity effect

“…Misinformation about an event is typically presented in one of three ways (Wright, Self, & Justice, 2000): (1) leading questions (see, e.g., Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978;Loftus & Palmer, 1974), (2) an event narrative, witness report, or media report (see, e.g., Betz, Skowronski, & Ostrom, 1996;Hoffman, Granhag, Kwong See, & Loftus, 2001;Luus & Wells, 1994;Meade & Roediger, 2002;Shaw, Garven, & Wood, 1997), or (3) an interaction with another person (see, e.g., Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003;Gabbert, Memon, Allan, & Wright, 2004;Gabbert, Memon, & Wright, 2006, 2007Hope, Ost, Gabbert, Healey, & Lenton, 2008;Meade & Roediger, 2002;Ost, Ghonouie, Cook, & Vrij, 2008;Paterson & Kemp, 2006a;Reysen, 2003Reysen, , 2005Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001;Schneider & Watkins, 1996;Shaw et al, 1997;Wright et al, 2000). This last means is perhaps the one that is most likely to occur in real life, and the misinformation effect that arises in co-witness situations has been termed a memory conformity effect (Wright et al, 2000).…”

Memory, metamemory, and social cues: Between conformity and resistance.

“…In other words, from the recognition performance results we may suspect that participants rely on external sources because it benefits their performance (see also Reysen, 2005;Schneider & Watkins, 1996). We cannot be sure, however, whether 'don't know' responses are used to regulate the accuracy of a memory report in this scenario, because we do not have access to responses participants decided to withhold by answering 'don't know'.…”

“…The logic is straightforward: under normal circumstances, memory reports of other people may not be entirely accurate, but they will rarely be purposefully misleading. As a consequence, there is a good chance that people's reports will contain accurate information that a consumer of these reports may incorporate into their own account of the remembered event.Research on memory conformity in recognition has indeed found that conforming to other people's memory decisions can have beneficial effects on memory performance, explaining why people may wish to rely on other people's memory reports in the first place (e.g., Reysen, 2005). A striking example of this comes from a recent study by Jaeger, Lauris, Selmeczy, and Dobbins (2012).…”