Conformity effects in memory as a function of uncertainty and attributional focus

Eva Walther
University of Trier, Germany

Previous research has shown that individuals tend to rely on information that is provided by others when they feel uncertain about their own memories. This is because other peoples’ judgments are one source of information about the world “out there” that helps the individual to reduce uncertainty. Based on previous research on memory conformity effects (Walther et al., 2001), the present work investigated the influence of surprise, attributional focus and metacognitive knowledge on individuals’ memory reports. It is assumed that the surprising violation of an expectation often inherent in the observation of a criminal act increases the need to explain the event which in turn enhances social influence. The results of an experimental study indicated that surprise and attributional focus enhanced social influence only if the stimulus was not judged to be particularly memorable.

The Role of Uncertainty for Audience-Tuning Effects on Memory

Jens H. Hellmann¹ ², Gerald Echterhoff¹, René Kopietz¹ & Amina Memon²
1 University of Bielefeld, Germany
2 University of Aberdeen, Scotland

Communicators often modify their messages about a topic toward their addressee’s attitude on this issue. This may lead to subsequent biased retellings of the original events. These audience-tuning effects could often be replicated over the last three decades with the Communication Game (e.g., Higgins, 1992). However, so far psychological researchers have focused on verbal material used to describe a target person. In this study we tried to investigate audience-tuning effects on memory in a more ecologically valid context. For the first time, participants watched a video that depicted ambiguous behaviours of a target person (instead of reading an essay). We were able to replicate audience-tuning effects for both memory and impression: Participants liked the target person more and remembered him in a positively biased way, after tuning a message to an audience who liked (vs. disliked) the target person and vice versa. Importantly, this was only the case after participants received a negative (vs. positive) feedback regarding their capability to form a reliable impression about other people. In sum, these results support the notion that high uncertainty about the communication topic is a necessary precondition for audiencetuning effects on memory (Echterhoff, Higgins, Kopietz & Groll, in press).