Social remembering: Quantitative aspects individual and collaborative remembering police officers and students

Abstract

Psychologists have generally investigated remembering as an intrapersonal phenomenon. However, everyday remembering often has a more social interpersonal flavour, particularly when two (or more) people jointly recall and discuss an event they have experienced or witnessed. This study examines quantitative differences between individual, dyadic and four‐person group free and cued recall of a purposive social interaction — a fictional police interrogation — and contrasts the findings from two subject samples, police officers and students. Overall, groups outperformed individuals in terms of accuracy, made fewer evaluative comments about the interaction, but were also more prone to a misplaced overconfidence in inaccurate recall than were individuals. Several interesting differences in accuracy and the incidence of different types of error were found between police and student subjects. These findings are discussed in terms of differences in familiarity with task requirements and the type of interaction recalled between subject samples, and the ecological validity of the findings for each subject sample.