Our memories are also subject to social influence and tend to align with the memories of the people around us. If you are in a group reminiscing about past experiences and someone adds a wrong detail about the story, you will tend to incorporate this detail into your own memory and later remember the experience with the erroneous detail. This process is called “memory conformity” or the “social contagion of memory”: one person’s error can “infect” another person’s memory. Of course, social influences are not always bad. If someone recalls details of joint memory on which you are somewhat hazy,
...more
