Consensus collaboration enhances group and individual recall accuracy

Abstract

We often remember in groups, yet research on collaborative recall finds “collaborative inhibition”: Recalling with others has costs compared to recalling alone. In related paradigms, remembering with others introduces errors into recall. We compared costs and benefits of two collaboration procedures—turn taking and consensus. First, 135 individuals learned a word list and recalled it alone (Recall 1). Then, 45 participants in three-member groups took turns to recall, 45 participants in three-member groups reached a consensus, and 45 participants recalled alone but were analysed as three-member nominal groups (Recall 2). Finally, all participants recalled alone (Recall 3). Both turn-taking and consensus groups demonstrated the usual pattern of costs during collaboration and benefits after collaboration in terms of recall completeness. However, consensus groups, and not turn-taking groups, demonstrated clear benefits in terms of recall accuracy, both during and after collaboration. Consensus groups engaged in beneficial group source-monitoring processes. Our findings challenge assumptions about the negative consequences of social remembering.

Keywords:

• Collaborative recall
• Collaborative inhibition
• Memory accuracy
• Social influences on memory
• False memory

Acknowledgments

The research we report is part of a larger long-term project on individual and group memory, and the research and the preparation of this manuscript were supported by: (a) an Australian Research Council PhD scholarship to Celia Harris; (b) an Australian Research Council Australian Research Fellowship to Amanda Barnier; (c) an Australian Research Council Discovery-Project Grant (DP0770271) to Amanda Barnier and John Sutton, and (d) the Danish National Research Foundation. We are grateful for that support. This research was conducted at Macquarie University as part of the requirements for Celia Harris's PhD, with the generous support of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. We are also most grateful to Paul Keil for research assistance and to Suparna Rajaram, Dan Wright, Craig Thorley, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on a previous draft of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ We developed the materials in this way to construct sets of semantically related words that were also normed for emotional valence. Of the 45 words each participant saw, 15 were positive, 15 were neutral, and 15 were negative, based on the ANEW database. However, the effects of valence were not reliable or consistent across tasks, and we do not report them here.

² There were five different word lists, and we counterbalanced the assigning of groups to a word list and collaboration condition such that three groups in each condition saw each list. Before we conducted the analyses we report in the Results section, we conducted a five-level (counterbalancing condition) univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) on all the nine dependent variables. This analysis indicated no significant effects of counterbalancing condition on any of our measures, all Fs < 0.98, all ps > .438. Thus, we considered the five lists equivalent, and we collapsed across counterbalancing conditions in the results reported here.

³ Wright (2007) offers an alternative method of forming nominal groups by creating multiple random combinations of individuals. This method increases power but was inappropriate in the current experiment, because participants were grouped based on counterbalancing condition.

⁴ We are grateful to Dan Wright for suggesting this analysis strategy.