Gerald Echterhoff

How eyewitnesses resist misinformation: social postwarnings and the monitoring of memory characteristics.

Previous findings have been equivocal as to whether the postevent misinformation effect on eyewitness memory is reduced by warnings presentedafter the misinformation (postwarnings). In the present research, social postwarnings, which characterize the postevent source as a low-credibility individual, diminished the misinformation effect in both cued recall and recognition tests. Discrediting the source as being either untrustworthy or incompetent was effective (Experiment 1). Also, postwarned participants rated reality characteristics of their memories more accurately than did participants receiving no or high-credibility information about the postevent source (Experiment 2). A social postwarning yielded the same results as an explicit source-monitoring appeal and led to longer response times for postevent items, relative to a no-warning condition (Experiments 3 and 4). The findings suggest that the reduced misinformation effect was due to more thorough monitoring of memory characteristics by postwarned participants, rather than to a stricter response criterion or to enhanced event memory.

Registered Replication Report

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal overshadowing” effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). More recent studies suggested that this effect might be substantially smaller than first reported. Given uncertainty about the effect size, the influence of this finding in the memory literature, and its practical importance for police procedures, we conducted two collections of preregistered direct replications (RRR1 and RRR2) that differed only in the order of the description task and a filler task. In RRR1, when the description task immediately followed the robbery, participants who provided a description were 4% less likely to select the robber than were those in the control condition. In RRR2, when the description was delayed by 20 min, they were 16% less likely to select the robber. These findings reveal a robust verbal overshadowing effect that is strongly influenced by the relative timing of the tasks. The discussion considers further implications of these replications for our understanding of verbal overshadowing.

Observation Inflation Your Actions Become Mine

Imagining performing an action can induce false memories of having actually performed it—this is referred to as the imagination-inflation effect. Drawing on research suggesting that action observation—like imagination—involves action simulation, and thus creates matching motor representations in observers, we examined whether false memories of self-performance can also result from merely observing another person’s actions. In three experiments, participants observed actions, some of which they had not performed earlier, and took a source-memory test. Action observation robustly produced false memories of self-performance relative to control conditions. The demonstration of this effect, which we refer to as observation inflation, reveals a previously unknown source of false memories that is ubiquitous in everyday life. The effect persisted despite warnings or instructions to focus on self-performance cues given immediately before the test, and despite elimination of sensory overlap between performance and observation. The findings are not easily reconciled with a source-monitoring account but appear to fit an account invoking interpersonal motor simulation.

Mixed-Methods-Designs

Im Zuge der zunehmenden Verwendung von Mixed-Methods-Designs wurden vielfach Vorschlage zur Systematisierung der verschiedenen Designvarianten vorgelegt. Im Folgenden sollen zunachst einige ausgewahlte Systematisierungsvorschlage fur Mixed- Methods- und Mixed-Model-Designs dargestellt werden, die zugleich Kriterien einer Methodenkombination verdeutlichen. Anschliesend werden einige ausgewahlte Designs anhand von Beispielen naher erlautert (◘ Abb. 10.1).

Audience-Tuning Effects on Memory

After tuning messages to their audience’s attitude, communicators’ subsequent memories for the topic are often biased toward their audience-congruent messages. In the context of personnel assessment in an organization, we examined the role of audience characteristics in this audience-tuning effect. Student communicators tuned their description of an employee to either an equal-status audience (a student temp) or a higher-status audience (a company board member). Audience-tuning occurred under both conditions, but a memory bias was found only in the equal-status condition. This audience-status effect was mediated by epistemic and relational trust in the audience. Apparently, the equal-status audience, while lacking domain-specific expertise, qualifies as a more trustworthy partner in creating a shared reality, which fulfills both epistemic and affiliative motives.

Social Influence on Memory

Human memory does not record and store information liketechnical devices. Rather, memory can deviate in variousways from the original experience of an event. It is fragileand potentially unreliable. Some deviations from the orig-inal experience can be attributed to forgetting or trace de-cay, while other deviations reflect systematic biases anddistortions (e.g., McDermott & Chan, 2003; Schacter,1999). According to a view that has been prominent sincethe 1970s, memories are dynamic and temporary construc-tions that are profoundly shaped by a host of factors likethe rememberers’ cognitive schemata, attitudes, and envi-ronmental conditions (see, e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). An important source of environmental in-fluences is contact and exchange with other people. Sur-prisingly, memory researchers have, for a long time now,paid little attention to such

Creating shared reality in interpersonal and intergroup communication: the role of epistemic processes and their interplay

ABSTRACT We describe research on the creation of shared reality in communication, emphasizing the epistemic processes that allow communicators to achieve confident judgements and evaluations about a communication topic. We distinguish three epistemic inputs: (1) the communicator’s own judgement about the topic (judgement of communicator); (2) the communicator’s perception of the audience’s judgement about the topic (judgement of audience); and (3) the communicator’s message to the audience about the topic (message of communicator). We argue that the influence of each input increases with the communicator’s confidence in the validity of that input. We review a variety of empirical studies in terms of this framework. We also address barriers to shared-reality creation in intergroup communication and describe interventions that work by increasing the validity strength of judgement of an outgroup audience. We discuss the relation between the present research and other approaches to social influence and social sharing.

Shared reality in intergroup communication: Increasing the epistemic authority of an out-group audience.

Communicators typically tune messages to their audience’s attitude. Such audience tuning biases communicators’ memory for the topic toward the audience’s attitude to the extent that they create a shared reality with the audience. To investigate shared reality in intergroup communication, we first established that a reduced memory bias after tuning messages to an out-group (vs. in-group) audience is a subtle index of communicators’ denial of shared reality to that out-group audience (Experiments 1a and 1b). We then examined whether the audience-tuning memory bias might emerge when the out-group audience’s epistemic authority is enhanced, either by increasing epistemic expertise concerning the communication topic or by creating epistemic consensus among members of a multiperson out-group audience. In Experiment 2, when Germans communicated to a Turkish audience with an attitude about a Turkish (vs. German) target, the audience-tuning memory bias appeared. In Experiment 3, when the audience of German communicators consisted of 3 Turks who all held the same attitude toward the target, the memory bias again appeared. The association between message valence and memory valence was consistently higher when the audience’s epistemic authority was high (vs. low). An integrative analysis across all studies also suggested that the memory bias increases with increasing strength of epistemic inputs (epistemic expertise, epistemic consensus, and audience-tuned message production). The findings suggest novel ways of overcoming intergroup biases in intergroup relations.

Thinking about memories for everyday and shocking events: do people use ease-of-retrieval cues in memory judgments?

Extant research shows that people use retrieval ease, a feeling-based cue, to judge how well they remember life periods. Extending this approach, we investigated the role of retrieval ease in memory judgments for single events. In Experiment 1, participants who were asked to recall many memories of an everyday event (New Year’s Eve) rated retrieval as more difficult and judged their memory as worse than did participants asked to recall only a few memories. In Experiment 2, this ease-of-retrieval effect was found to interact with the shocking character of the remembered event: There was no effect when the event was highly shocking (i.e., learning about the attacks of September 11, 2001), whereas an effect was found when the event was experienced as less shocking (due either to increased distance to “9/11” or to the nonshocking nature of the event itself). Memory vividness accounted for additional variance in memory judgments, indicating an independent contribution of content-based cues in judgments of event memories.

“Social Robotics” und Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion

Zusammenfassung: Aus aktuellen Entwicklungen zur Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion (MMI), insbesondere auf dem wachsenden Feld der Social Robotics, entstehen neuartige Perspektiven fur die sozialpsychologische Forschung. Da Computer und Roboter sich in besonderem Mase als Objekte einer Anthropomorphisierung eignen, sollten psychologische Zugange auch in diesem Forschungsfeld hilfreich sein. Ausgehend von Unterscheidungen zwischen verschiedenen Typen dieser Maschinen werden mogliche Beitrage der Sozialpsychologie zur interdisziplinaren Forschung und Entwicklung skizziert. Vorliegende Befunde zur sozialen Dimension der MMI werden vorgestellt und diskutiert: das Forschungsprogramm “Computer als soziale Akteure” sowie Ansatze zur Menschenahnlichkeit der Maschine als unabhangiger und abhangiger Variablen. Abschliesend schlagen wir spezifische Themen fur die zukunftige sozialpsychologische Forschung in drei klassischen Bereichen vor (Urteilsprozesse im Kontext der MMI, “interpersonelle” Prozesse und Intergruppenbezie...