ABSTRACT
People don’t exist in a social vacuum, and neither do memories (Halbwachs, 1925/1992, 1950/1980). How we store, retain and remember things is shaped by other (present or imagined) people and by socially constituted meanings such as norms, values, attitudes and stereotypes (as demonstrated in a large variety of phenomena subsumed under the umbrella terms of social memory and collective memory; see Clark & Stephenson, 1989; Weldon, 2001; Hirst & Manier, 2008; Blank, 2009; for overviews). By implication, this holds also for false and distorted memories. If any proof was needed for this assertion, a brief look at the chapters in this book provides numerous examples where a change in remembering resulted from suggestive information provided by a social source. 1
In the face of such massive evidence for the social embeddedness of remembering, it seems surprising that social psychological theory has not been invoked more systematically to explain false and distorted remembering. The main reason for this is probably that false/distorted memory phenomena have been mostly studied by cognitive psychologists, who tend to be less familiar with social psychology. Also, perhaps as a result of this, social explanations have often been seen as ‘competing’ with cognitive explanations, rather than as complementing them. In our view, social and cognitive analyses relate to different levels of explanation: along the lines of the old adage that behind every great man there’s a great woman, one could say that behind many a cognitive process involved in false and distorted memory there’s a social factor that brings it into play.
