Today's post is from Celia Harris , who works in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. In this post she summarises research from her paper " Social Contagion of Autobiographical Memories " recently published in Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. I’m interested in memory, and particularly the social and functional aspects. What do we use memory for in our day-to-day lives, and in our social relationships? And how does this inform our models and theories of memory, which have typically been developed by focusing on individuals learning word lists in a lab? One of the aims of my research has been to counter the negative emphasis on the power of social interaction to distort memory. My research suggests that social influence does indeed shape and alter memories in interesting ways, consistent with our goals of agreeing with others and being informed by them. However I argue that we shouldn’t necessaril
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health