The long-term objective of this research is to increase knowledge regarding the role of social influence on memory across the lifespan. Memory plays a crucial role in social relationships and transactions. If misleading social influence alters memory responses, people may experience negative consequences including increased vulnerability to deception and fraud. This could be particularly problematic for older adults who experience more memory failures or are less confident in their memory. Because both memory and conformity contribute to memory responses it is difficult to understand the underlying dynamics of social influence from the memory responses alone. What is a needed is a model of how memory and conformity both contribute to performance, and some means to estimate the contribution of each. The proposed experiments assume that memory and conformity contribute independently to performance. Then, Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure will be used to obtain separate estimates of memory and conformity. Experiment 1 investigates whether younger and older adults vary in response to social influence exerted by confederates and whether any differences are due to different levels of memory and/or different strengths in a bias to conform. Experiment 2 investigates the social and cognitive processes underlying social influence on memory responses across the lifespan. it investigates whether conforming responses are a function of normative versus informational social influence by varying whether responses are made publicly or privately.
| Hanley, Kathryn A (2011) The double-edged sword: How evolution can make or break a live-attenuated virus vaccine. Evolution (N Y) 4:635-643 |
