Collaborative remembering reduces suggestibility: A study with the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale

ABSTRACT

Collaboration during the retrieval phase can have both negative and positive effects (referred to as collaborative inhibition and error pruning, respectively) on emotional and eyewitness memory. To further elucidate these issues, the present experiment used the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale to investigate the question of whether collaborative remembering reduced post-event suggestibility. Collaborative and nominal pairs listened to the GSS2, provided immediate and delayed (after 30 min) free recalls, and answered a series of leading questions before or after receiving a negative feedback about their performance. We found no evidence of collaborative inhibition in the immediate and delayed free recall tasks. Importantly, however, collaborative pairs produced less confabulated elements in the free recall tasks, were considerably less prone to give in to leading questions (both before and after receiving the negative feedback), and exhibited lower levels of Total Suggestibility, compared to both nominal and individual dyads. Taken together, these results support the conclusion that collaboration can have a beneficial influence on eyewitnesses’ accuracy, by strengthening their resistance to post-event suggestibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative recall
• eyewitness memory
• interrogative suggestibility
• error pruning

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Giacomo Angelini, Silvia Iacovacci, and Chiara Salbini for their help in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As we did not register the time taken by nominal and collaborative pairs to complete the free recall tasks, we cannot rule out the possibility that the absence of collaborative inhibition was due to uncontrolled differences in retrieval time. That is, collaborative dyads might have worked longer than individuals in nominal dyads, thereby attenuating the negative effects of collaboration. The potential role of this factor has been examined by Hyman, Cardwell, and Roy (2013, Exp.3). These authors measured the number of words recalled by nominal and collaborative pairs in each 30-sec retrieval interval (from 0 to 240 sec). They found that, compared to nominal pairs, collaborative pairs worked longer (310 vs. 226 sec) and recalled more words in the later retrieval periods (from 91 sec onward). Interestingly, collaborative inhibition was absent, suggesting that the difference in retrieval time might have played a key role in eliminating the negative effects of collaboration. However, another factor was simultaneously manipulated in this experiment: namely, category exemplars were encoded blocked by category, rather than in a random order. Since the use of this procedure is known to impose a clear retrieval strategy and therefore to attenuate the size of collaborative inhibition (Basden et al., 1997; Finlay et al., 2000), no clear conclusion can be drawn from this single study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted at Sapienza University. The authors report that they have no financial interests or benefits arising from direct application of this research.