Acknowledge, repeat, rephrase, elaborate: Witnesses can help each other remember more

Abstract

Crimes are often observed by multiple witnesses. Research shows that witnesses can contaminate each other's memory, but potential benefits of co-witness discussion have not yet been investigated. We examined whether witnesses can help each other remember, or prune each other's errors. In a research design with high ecological validity, attendees of a theatre play were interviewed approximately one week later about a violent scene in the play. The couples that signed up for our study had known each other for 31 years on average. Participants were first interviewed individually and then took part in a collaborative interview. We also included a control condition in which participants took part in two individual interviews. Collaboration did not help witnesses to remember more about the scene, but collaborative pairs made significantly fewer errors than nominal pairs. Further, quantitative and qualitative analyses of retrieval strategies during the discussion revealed that couples who actively acknowledged, repeated, rephrased, and elaborated upon each other's statements remembered significantly more information overall. Taken together, our findings suggest that, under certain circumstances, discussion between witnesses is not such a bad idea after all.

Keywords:

• Social cognition
• Transactive memory
• Collaborative recall
• Eyewitness memory
• Retrieval strategy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Robin Groen, Juliette Ampt, and Mayra Ramdihal for their assistance with data collection and coding. We are grateful to the Ro Theater Rotterdam and the Toneelschuur Haarlem and its director Frans Lommerse for allowing us to conduct our research on the play “Bossen”.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹Preliminary analyses revealed no differences between central and peripheral details, hence this variable is not discussed further.

²Note that negative loadings on the Content-Focused Interaction component (see Table 4) are negatively related to the amount of information reported, which means that content-focused interactive behaviour is a positive predictor of the amount of information reported.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Society in Science—Branco Weiss Fellowship awarded to Annelies Vredeveldt.