How social is social memory? Isolating the influences of social and nonsocial cues on recall.

It is intuitive to think that retrieval cues always aid recall. Surprisingly, cues sometimes hurt recall. This counterintuitive phenomenon occurs regardless of whether the cues come from a social (a person) or a nonsocial (a computer or article) source. However, we do not know whether recall impairment differs depending on the source, raising the question—do social versus nonsocial sources create differential impacts on memory and, if so, what theoretical mechanism underlies this difference? We addressed these questions by directly comparing memory impairment across collaborative recall (cues received from social sources) and part-list cued recall (cues received from nonsocial sources). We aligned the two procedures by taking the recall output of each collaborative group and generating cues for part-list cued participants. This yoked design enabled us to present identical cues and equate their presentation sequence across the two cuing conditions. We also devised a group-level recall index for the part-list cued “groups” yoked to the collaborative groups, thus equating the recall metric between conditions. Across two experiments (N = 270), we replicated both the standard collaborative inhibition and part-list cuing impairments. Collaborative groups exhibited more reciprocal influence on one another’s recall than part-list cuing participants, producing responses from the same taxonomic category as the cues more often than part-list cuing participants, and exhibiting greater collective memory. These findings provide evidence for the operation of the cross-cuing mechanism in social remembering relative to nonsocial remembering. We discuss these theoretical contributions and implications for education, information transmission, beliefs, and collective narratives.