![]() ![]() ![]() We argue that people spontaneously monitor current stimuli for relevance to their interaction partner. Research on simultaneous co-attention with others 18, co-representation of information 19, and distributed task performance 20, 21 suggests that people encode and incorporate to a greater extent information that is relevant to (vs. In the present study, we investigated whether false memories can be socially induced in the absence of misinformation. However, more subtle mechanisms of social appraisal and perceived relevance, operating already at encoding, may likewise contribute to the creation of false memories. Participants are likely to incorporate post-encoding misinformation communicated by a social source if they assume that the source is sufficiently trustworthy 16, 17. Notably, these previous demonstrations of socially induced false memories rely on communication of misinformation presented after the initial encoding of relevant episodes. Such influence can have serious, unwanted consequences, such as biased assessments of past events, suboptimal decision-making, and unfair judgments of actors, even the imprisonment of innocent people 12, 13, 14, 15. A chief tool for exerting social influence are suggestive techniques, which can create even rich and vivid false memories 10, 11. However, such influences not always strengthen veridical memories, but can also be sources of false memories, i.e., memories for events that did not actually happen 4, 5, exemplified by the famous misinformation effect 6, memory conformity 7 and social contagion of memory 8, 9. ![]() Given that humans are members of an “ultrasocial” species 1, our memory contents are constantly shaped by social interaction and communication 2, 3. Human memory is highly susceptible to social influence. This has important implications both theoretically and practically (e.g., in forensic contexts). These findings show for the first time that social induction of false memories, even subjectively rich ones, does not necessarily require communication of deceptive information. Notably, this effect also persisted for particularly rich memories. Participants (total N = 113) reported more false memories for non-presented words (lures) semantically related to partner-assigned than to control lists, although both list types were equally irrelevant to their own task. One color remained unassigned (control condition). Each individual was instructed to memorize words presented in one of the colors. Pairs of participants jointly viewed semantically coherent word lists, presented successively in blue, green, or red letters. Here, we demonstrate in two experiments a new, tacit form of socially generated false memories, resulting from interpersonal co-monitoring at encoding without communication of misinformation. Ample evidence shows that post-encoding misinformation from others can induce false memories. ![]()
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