ABSTRACT

Psychologists recognized long ago that memory is not like a tape recorder, in that its accuracy is almost always suspect. As a result, one might expect that two people who experience the same event may remember it quite differently. Memory errors of both omission and commission are not random, however. There is a pattern, a systematicity to them. As Bartlett (1932) noted, errors of commission, in particular, seem to be a product of reconstruction based not exclusively on decaying stored representations of the past, but also on current attitudes, schemata, and, importantly, the social and physical environment in which the remembering occurs. The different attitudes, schemata, and social and physical environments in which people remember can lead them to recollect the past in ways that differ from one person to the next. In this chapter, we want to explore another, albeit paradoxical, consequence of memory’s malleability: that the same attitudes, schemata, and social and physical environments that promote individual differences can also transform initially disparate memories into shared recollections.