Collaborative remembering of emotional events: The case of Rabin's assassination

Abstract

Individual and collaborative remembering of the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin, were compared. In line with previous laboratory findings on memory of neutral stimuli, it was hypothesised that collaborative remembering (three individuals reaching a common response) and nominal remembering (three individual responses pooled together) of the assassination would be more accurate than individual remembering. A total of 146 participants responded (115 individually and 120 in groups of three) to open-ended and multiple-choice questionnaires (among them, 89 responded twice with a week of intertest interval) about Rabin's assassination and the events that preceded and followed it. Data analysis showed that the collaborative responses to the open-ended questionnaire contained more details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the individual responses, and that the responses to the multiple-choice questionnaire were more accurate than the individual responses. However, the collaborative responses contained fewer details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the nominal responses. Responses to the two questionnaires were more accurate on the retest when they followed collaborative rather than individual responses on the original test. The inferiority of the collaborative relative to the nominal remembering was attributed to collaborative inhibition, whereas the positive effect of collaborative remembering on performance on the retest was attributed to the contribution of contextual cues.