Who will influence memories of listeners: Evidence from socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting.

Numerous studies have shown that speakers will affect listeners’ memories in a conversation. Especially when listeners concurrently retrieve the information with the speaker, listeners’ memories will be reshaped through the way of socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF). Using a modified retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm, we explored the effects of speakers’ expertise and listeners’ attitude toward euthanasia on SS-RIF when the conversation topic was general (Experiment 1) and self-relevant (Experiment 2). Our results showed that SS-RIF was more likely to emerge when speakers were perceived as non-experts than when speakers were perceived as experts. Additionally, when the topic was self-relevant, SS-RIF also could appear when the attitude of the listener was consistent with that of the expert speaker. These findings suggest that listeners’ memories can be influenced by the social relationship and the consistency of attitude between speakers and listeners in important medical decision-making tasks.