Remembering in Conversations: The Social Sharing and Reshaping of Memories
- 10 January 2012
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Annual Reviews in Annual Review of Psychology
- Vol. 63 (1), 55-79
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100340
Abstract
People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychological research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (transactive memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative inhibition, information sampling biases, and audience tuning). We next examine how conversational remembering affects subsequent memory. Here, we address influences on listeners' memory through social contagion, resistance to such influences, and then retrieval/reexposure effects on either speaker or listener, with a focus on retrieval-induced forgetting. Extending the perspective beyond single interactions, we consider work that has explored how the above effects can spread across networks of several individuals. We also explore how a speaker's motive to form a shared reality with listeners can moderate conversational effects on memory. Finally, we discuss how these various conversational effects may promote the formation of collective memories.Keywords
This publication has 109 references indexed in Scilit:
- Long-term memory for the terrorist attack of September 11: Flashbulb memories, event memories, and the factors that influence their retention.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2009
- Audience-Tuning Effects on MemorySocial Psychology, 2009
- Audience-Congruent Biases in Eyewitness Memory and JudgmentSocial Psychology, 2009
- Source monitoring 15 years later: What have we learned from fMRI about the neural mechanisms of source memory?Psychological Bulletin, 2009
- A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memoryCognitive Systems Research, 2008
- The social construction of the personal past and its implications for adult development.Psychological Bulletin, 2001
- The social construction of the personal past and its implications for adult development.Psychological Bulletin, 2001
- Group remembering: Does social loafing underlie collaborative inhibition?Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2000
- Memory States and Memory Tasks: An Integrative Framework for Eyewitness Memory and SuggestibilityMemory, 1998
- How what we tell becomes what we know: Listener effects on speakers’ long‐term memory for eventsDiscourse Processes, 1998