Social influence on eyewitness memory

• Social influence on memory may come in many shapes and forms, and in the current chapter we will mainly focus on the influence exerted by other witnesses; so-called ‘co-witness influence’. Co-witness influence refers to a situation where a witness conforms to the statement presented by one or several other witnesses (i.e., the witness changes his or her memory in accordance with the external pressure). We will start by focusing on children’s memory and review a number of sources that moderate social influence, and we will also briefly discuss different memory errors that may follow. Then we turn to some of the factors that appear to regulate the social influence on adults’ memory reports. In a separate section we acknowledge the difficulty deciding whether a witness who incorrectly reports a specific detail really does have a false memory, or is simply reporting this detail without actually remembering it. Before summing up we invoke some basic concepts from cognitive and social psychology which illuminates why the effects following social influence are so powerful and pervasive.

Keyword

Children's memory

social influence

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kap (subject category)