You say tomato? Collaborative remembering leads to more false memories for intimate couples than for strangers

Abstract

Research on memory conformity shows that collaborative remembering—typically in the form of discussion—can influence people's memories. One question that remains is whether it matters with whom we discuss our memories. To address this question we compared people's memories for an event after they discussed that event with either their romantic partner or a stranger. Pairs of subjects watched slightly different versions of a movie, and then discussed some details from the movie, but not others. Subjects were better at remembering non-discussed details than discussed details: when remembering discussed details they incorrectly reported information from their partner's version instead of their own. In addition, subjects who discussed the event with their romantic partner (rather than with a stranger) were even more likely to report false memories. We discuss our findings in relation to other research on memory conformity, social influences on false memories, and memory systems within romantic relationships.

Acknowledgements

Kazuo Mori is now at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan.

We are grateful for the support of the New Zealand Government through the Marsden Fund, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand on behalf of the Marsden Fund Council. This research was supported by a Grant-in-Aid from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (Grant No.16330139) to KM. Our thanks to Carol Tavris, Matthew Gerrie, Melanie Takarangi, Sophie Parker, Eryn Newman, Jeff Foster, Devon Polaschek, and Rebecca Bell; to Fiona Gabbert and two anonymous reviewers; and especially to Stefanie Sharman and Deryn Strange, for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

¹Two couples and one stranger pair were not included in the study because one member in each pair did not follow instructions; one person repeatedly tilted his head during the movie, and the other two made no attempt at filler tasks. A further two stranger pairs were excluded because of a fault with the digital voice recorder. The data we present are for the remaining 64 subjects.

²Thus, random responding to critical items on the recognition test would yield a proportion correct score of 0.5 (50%).

³Effect sizes were calculated using G*Power v3.0.