ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that Charles B. Stone examining the importance of context in understanding how selective silence in a social interaction may lead both the speaker and the listener to forget the past. Stone outlines a basic, individual memory paradigm known as retrieval-induced forgetting. He then shows how this individual memory paradigm has been extended to social interactions. He demonstrates how the selective silence within a social interaction has important and counter-intuitive consequences for how both the speaker and the listener remember the past. He further highlights two critical contexts in which forgetting, as a result of selective silence, is moderated. In doing so, he argues that the context in which the selective silence occurs merely provides the potential for forgetting and thus, if the speaker and listener do not undertake the necessary mnemonic processes, regardless of context, there should not be any induced forgetting on the part of the speaker or the listener.
