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Social Memory (Y2) - Coggle Diagram
Social Memory (Y2)
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What is social memory?
Mandela effect - a situation in which a large mass of people believe an event occurred when it did not
- Memories can be unreliable
Traditional definition -
- Memory of one's own social experiences
- Socially framed
- Distinct from neural and biological explanations of memory
Recent - collective memory -
- Memories shared by a social group
- The influence of group beliefs, motivations and identity
What is a collective memory?
- A memory shared by an ingroup - can be small and can be reinforced
- Communicative memory - memories sustained through socialisation and traditions
- Cultural memory - memories maintained by records and more factual sources
Function of collective memory -
- Social identity theory - provides a group narrative, and sustains the 'we are different from them' through shared memory
- Social representation theory - defines how a group should behave, with memories driving the group into action
Evolution of collective memory -
- Collective memories are not fixed, rather they are constantly evolving
- Familial memories are passed through generations, and the story will inevitably change each time
Effect of collective memory - What happens when different ingroups experience the same event?
- Their stance / ingroup identity will lead to a different interpretation of events that occurred
- Iacozza et al, 2019 - the more of an ingroup bias there is, the less accurate a response to a situation is - you go with the group memory rather than your own
Summary -
- Social memory and collective memory are different things
- Collective memory serves a function that builds and maintains social identities and representations
- It is not static
- Lead to biases in social settings
The role of conversation
We often remember during conversations - our remembering is however tuned to our audience:
- We are selective in our typical conversations
- What are the effects of conversational remembering on speakers and listeners - social influence of one person on another
-> Reinforcement - when a speaker repeats known information, this reinforces existing memories, enhances remembering of them and leads to a stronger effect for those remembering over just listening
The role of conversation -
- Encoding of an event -> subsequent remembering
- Conversations -> subsequent remembering and they are the cause of - implanting memories, altering memories and inducing forgetting
Social contagion - one of the consequences of discussion on later individual recall is social contagion (Roediger, Meade and Bergman, 2001)
- Spread of one person's memory to another by means of social interaction (Hirst and Echterhoff, 2012)
- Loftus' work can be viewed under the umbrella of social contagion -
-> misleading about experienced events
-> implanting new memories of non-experienced events
Standard social contagion experiment has three main stages (Roediger et al, 2001) -
- Collaborative study of materials -> collaborative recall of the materials with the confederate who recalls some erroneous information -> final, individual recall task
- Roediger -> six slides pf household scenes, filler task, collaborative recall, individual recall of rooms
-> Results - greater false recall of contagion items (suggested by confederate) than items not suggested by the confederate
Flashbulb memories
Memories of the circumstances in which people learnt of an impactful, and emotionally charged event (Brown and Kulik, 1977; Hirst and Phelps. 2016)
- The source events are inherently public because there is an informant
- They are memories of the reception event
Brown and Kulik (1977) operationalised the 'flashbulb effect' as a memory for which participants could answer 'yes' and whose content matched 1 or more of the canonical categories
- Canonical categories - types of information frequently reported in the accounts of the news
-> Place - where the news was learnt
-> Aftermath - on learning the news
-> Ongoing activity interrupted by the news
-> Own affect - in themselves
-> Other affect - in others
-> Informant - who told the news
- The content of these categories varies cross individuals, and it can also be idiosyncratic or accidental
- Brown and Kulik (1977) -
-> Ingroup association also increases your likelihood of a flashbulb memory
Possible applications - Can be used to study traumatic memories
- Brown and Kulk (1977) - argued for specific neural correlates underlying flashbulb memories
- Sharot, Matoerella, Delgado and Phelps (2007) found a selective activation of amygdala (involved in memory and emotion activation) in participants who were close to, but not at the World Trade Center
- However, learning of a traumatic event is different to experiencing it
Key features -
- Novelty
- Unexpectedness
- Consequentiality - what consequences for my life, both direct and indirect, has this event had?
What are they not -
- They are incomplete
- They are not first-hand - we do not experience the event, we are informed
- They are not event memories, but memories about the facts concerning the event
Are flashbulb memories special - Brown and Kulik, 1977 -
- Flashbulb memories are different to other autobiographical memories; they are underlain by a 'Print Now' mechanism, thus inedible, and they remain unchanged
- They do not equal -> ordinary memory mechanism hypothesis - same encoding, storing and retrieving processes involved in other autobiographical memories
Some studies have used a test-retest methodology -
- Recollection immediately after the flashbulb event
- Recollection after a delay
Flashbulb memories do not remain unchanged -
- Inconsistencies between the two recollections emerge - usually within a year and they tend to be repeated (Hirst et al, 2009; 2015)
- Although initially they may be better recalled, consistency declines as in other autobiographical memories
-> However, confidence in flashbulb memories remains high
Phantom flashbulb memories (Neisser and Harsch, 1992) -
- Challenger space shuttle explosion
- 106 participants given the same questionnaire from B and K's 1977 study
- 2 years later, follow-up study to recall the event using the same process - phantom flashbulb memory
Flashbulb memories can be accounted by ordinary memory mechanisms, but there is debate about necessary and sufficient factors underlying their formation - stability, rehearsal and consequentiality
- E.g. Princess Diana's death is well remembered despite little personal consequence
Summary -
- There are two definitions of social memory - traditional and collective
- Our memory system is malleable - source monitoring effects, misinformation effect and plating rich / implausible and impossible false memories
- Flashbulb memories - we are highly confident in them but are subject to distortions
- Consequences of remembering in conversations - reinforcement through repetition and social contagion