Focusing on Transmission and Convergence
Building on the analogy to epidemiology, a psychology of collective memory should consider:
- the transmission of a memory from one person in the community to another person,
- the convergence of disparate individual memories of an event onto a shared rendering of this event,
- the degree to which this shared rendering remains stable over time.
A widely shared individual memory can only properly be viewed as a collective memory if it bears on collective identity.
Memory is malleable and often unreliable and inaccurate, which means transmission is as well. These features might provide the conditions for and encourage the formation and convergence of collective memories, which, in turn, will help consolidate their collective identity.
Conversations as A Memory Practice Shaping Collective Memory
A Case Study for a Psychology of Collective Memory
quotidian acts of conversation seem to have the potential to promote the formation of a collective memory.
The Effect of Speaker on Listener
Three ways a speaker might affect the memory of a listener: social contagion, resistance, and induced forgetting.
Social Contagion
Postevent misinformation effect: participants falsely remember seeing a yield sign in a traffic accident if the postevent narrative mentioned one.
Speakers can also implant entirely new memories — participants have been led to remember being lost in a shopping mall, riding in a hot-air balloon, or meeting Daffy Duck at Disneyland, none of which happened (Loftus, 2005).
At least three factors can affect the degree to which social contagion will occur: conversational dynamics, the characteristics of the speaker, and the characteristics of the listener.
Conversational dynamics
Different conversational dynamics produce different collective memories from the same starting individual memories: without a dominant narrator, the group converges on memories everyone already shared; with one, the group converges on the dominant narrator’s version, including memories only they held.
Characteristics of the speaker
Perceived experts are more effective at reshaping others’ memories, even when they don’t necessarily know more.
The mechanism is source monitoring: people normally track where a memory came from (did I see this or did someone tell me?), but this is effortful. Conversations are cooperative by default (Grice), so listeners assume what speakers say is true and skip the effort. Perceived expertise amplifies this — listeners trust the speaker more, monitor less, and are more likely to absorb the speaker’s version as their own memory
Characteristics of the listener
Not everyone is equally open to having their memories reshaped by others, which means collective memory formation isn’t uniform across a community.
Children and the elderly are more vulnerable, likely because the frontal lobe (which handles source monitoring) is underdeveloped in the young and impaired in the old. Personality matters too: people who are more open, agreeable, extroverted, or feeling-oriented are more susceptible, as are people with higher dissociation scores and those with PTSD.
Resistance
People can resist memory influence when they distrust the speaker, and explicit warnings (before or after exposure) generally reduce social contagion. But both come at a cost.
Postwarnings trigger more careful source monitoring, which successfully filters out some false memories but also causes people to incorrectly reject valid memories.
Prewarnings are more paradoxical: they work when the listener has a strong memory of the original event, but when a dominant narrator is involved and the listener’s memory is weak, prewarnings actually increase susceptibility. The listener can’t just ignore the dominant speaker without losing the conversation entirely, so instead tries to discriminate old from new while paying closer attention— that closer attention to what the narrator says creates a more robust memory of the narrator’s version, which the listener then mistakes for the original.
Resistance to a dominant narrator is most likely to backfire when the listener’s own memory is weakest — which is when they most need it to work.
Induced Forgetting
Collective forgetting works through selective retelling, not silence. First, when a speaker selectively recalls some material, the act of retrieving it inhibits related but unmentioned material, making it harder to remember later (retrieval-induced forgetting; Anderson et al. 1994).
Second, this means mentioning a topic while omitting specific details suppresses those details more effectively than avoiding the topic altogether — a politician who talks about the Iraq war build-up while omitting WMDs does more damage to memories of WMDs than one who avoids the subject entirely.
Third, this extends to listeners in social settings: when a listener monitors a speaker for accuracy, they concurrently retrieve their own memories to compare, triggering the same inhibition and forgetting the same unmentioned material (Cuc et al. 2007). But listeners who are only monitoring for speaker fluency, rather than veracity, don’t retrieve concurrently and don’t forget.
Summary
What a speaker says will influence what a listener remembers.
Three paths to the formation of a collective memory:
- Social contagion
- Reinforcement of shared memories
- Induced forgetting
A careful analysis of the psychological processes underlying the formation of a collective memory uncovers genuinely unexpected and, in some cases, paradoxical results: that the content of a collective memory can depend on such seemingly incidental features as the way a conversation unfolds, that resistance can sometimes lead to the rejection of information that should be retained and can sometimes even promote the formation of just the kind of collective memory one wants to avoid, and that silences can induce forgetting, but are more effective in doing so when they are accompanied by related information.
The Effect of Speaker on Speaker
Speakers don’t just reshape listeners’ memories—they reshape their own.
The Saying-is-Believing Effect
When speakers adapt their retelling to a listener’s attitude (audience tuning), their own subsequent memory shifts to match what they said rather than what they originally experienced.
- In the experimental setup, the original material about a target person is deliberately ambiguous—behaviors could be read positively or negatively. The speaker has no strong preexisting attitude. The finding: the speaker’s subsequent memory of the original material biases to match what they said.
- Mere rehearsal is not enough to produce the memory bias; the participant must actually communicate it.
- Finding: the effect disappears even when speakers expect to communicate it, rehearse it, but never actually communicate it.
The Speaker’s Creation of a Shared Reality with the Audience
The saying-is-believing effect requires a genuinely interpersonal explanation, not just an information-processing one.
- What drives the memory shift is the speaker’s creation of a shared reality with the listener—experiencing a commonality between one’s own and others’ representations of the world.
Shared reality is motivated by two core needs: relational (affiliation, connection, security) and epistemic (achieving reliable understanding, especially under ambiguity).
- The ambiguity of the original material is what activates the epistemic motive—speakers reduce their uncertainty by incorporating the audience-congruent message into their own representation.
Conditions Critical to Achieving a Shared Reality
Two necessary conditions to create shared reality:
- The speaker must be motivated to create a shared reality.
- Speakers who feel uncertain about their social judgments (via bogus negative feedback) tune their messages and show the memory bias; speakers who feel confident do not.
- Speakers who are paid to tune their messages show pronounced audience tuning but no memory bias.
- Memory bias only occurs with in-group audiences, where the tuning serves genuine epistemic and relational goals.
- The speaker must experience the creation as successful.
- In the experimental setup, speakers describe an ambiguous target person to a listener, who then tries to identify which person was being described from a set of candidates. When the listener picks correctly, the speaker treats that as confirmation that their audience-tuned description captured something true — and that version consolidates into their own memory. When the listener picks incorrectly, the speaker doesn’t trust the exchange as having established shared understanding, and the original representation persists.
Summary
The effect of speaker on speaker has a different profile from the effect of speaker on listener. For speakers to reshape their own memories, they must be genuinely motivated to create a shared reality with the listener, and they must experience that creation as successful.
Saying is not necessarily believing—it depends on the goal underlying the audience tuning.
Concluding Remarks
Conversations reshape memory through multiple pathways — social contagion, reinforcement of shared memories, induced forgetting, and the saying-is-believing effect — none of which require anyone to intend to shape collective memory. The formation of collective memory depends on seemingly incidental features: who dominates the conversation, whether listeners trust the speaker, whether speakers are genuinely motivated to create shared reality or just performing compliance. Resistance can backfire, silence can erase more than avoidance, and speakers can reshape their own memories without realizing it.
The authors acknowledge the gap between controlled experiments (at most four participants) and real-world collective memory formation (communities, nations, generations). But they argue the principles generalize: the same psychological analysis they applied to conversation could be applied to memorials, commemorations, and other memory practices. The contribution of psychology is addressing the problem of reception — not just cataloging what societies produce to shape memory, but testing whether and how those tools actually change what people remember.