How does social competition affect true and false recognition?
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BRIEF REPORT
How does social competition affect true and false recognition? Zhenliang Liu 1,2 & Tiantian Liu 1 & Yansong Li 1,2 Accepted: 30 August 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Memory is highly susceptible to distortions, which can exert serious consequences in daily life. Despite this, we still know little about the role of factors that comprise social contexts in which memory processes occur. In the present study, we attempted to address this issue by examining how social competition influences true and false recognition. Participants performed a version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm designed to lure them into producing both true and false recognition either in competition against or independently of another person. We found that participants in the competition group showed lower levels of true and false recognition than those in the control group. Signal-detection analyses revealed that participants in both groups showed equivalent memory sensitivity for true recognition, while those in the competition group exhibited a decreased sensitivity for false recognition, which implies enhanced item-specific encoding during social competition. Moreover, participants in the competition group showed a more conservative response bias for both true and false recognition at retrieval than those in the control group, indicating a shift towards conservatism in decision strategy for both true and false recognition during social competition. The results provide compelling evidence for a decision-based reduction of true recognition and both encoding-based and decision-based reductions of false recognition under competitive contexts. Therefore, these novel findings may have implications both for understanding the powerful role of social competition on true and false memories and for understanding the potential role of social competition on other aspects of memory processes. Keywords Social competition . False memory . Sensitivity . Response bias
Introduction In our daily life, memory processes can be prone to distortions and illusions in the form of false memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005; Gallo, 2013; Loftus & Pickrell, 1995; Roediger & Mcdermott, 1996; Schacter, Guerin, & Jacques, 2011). Given such a phenomenon of high prevalence, considerable efforts have been dedicated in recent decades to empirically exploring how memory processes are distorted by a variety of factors. In addition to factors associated with features intrinsic to memory tasks, the available literature suggests that memory processes are sensitive to social contexts in which memory processes occur (Barnier, Sutton, Harris, & Wilson, 2008; * Yansong Li [email protected] 1
Reward, Competition and Social Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
2
Institute for Brain Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Bless, Strack, & Walther, 2001; Bookbinder & Brainerd, 2016; Echterhoff & Hirst, 2009; Newbury & Monaghan, 2019; Weldon
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