Social Collaboration Does Not Shape the Effects Caused by Self-Encoding: Evidence From Ongoing and Enduring Collaboration

Abstract

Past studies have illustrated that we tend to prioritize remembering information that is relevant to ourselves, resulting in a self-reference effect. This effect is often influenced by emotions associated with the stimuli, frequently showcasing a self-positivity bias. However, these effects have only been observed in individual memory, without any consideration given to a social collaboration setting. The current study intended to clarify these effects in ongoing and enduring social collaboration. Participants were instructed to encode personality trait adjectives, displayed in different colors with various emotional valences, using either self-reference or other-reference methods. They were then tasked with individually or collaboratively recalling the words along with their associated encoding task, followed by individual recall. Our data indicated evidence of the self-reference effect in item memory during both ongoing and enduring collaborative sessions. This effect was evident for words studied in red, but the pattern was reversed for those in green. Additionally, the self-positivity bias was observed when retrieving the source of the encoding task during ongoing collaborative sessions. A reversed self-positivity bias was observed in item memory for words that were studied in green. An unexpected finding was that whether participants collaborated or not did not influence the effects we were investigating. Overall, we have extended the self-reference effect and self-positivity bias to the social collaboration setting, demonstrating that these effects remain consistent even in collaborative environments. This suggests that the underlying theories driving the effects are not contingent on social interaction. Moving forward, potential future directions for research are considered.

Keywords

collaboration / emotional valence / episodic memory / self-positivity bias / self-reference

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