Dishonesty in public reports of confidence: metacognitive monitoring of memory conformity

Abstract

Although memory is constantly monitored and controlled by the metacognitive system, little is known about how people monitor memory conformity, incorporating information in others' memories into one's memory of a specific event. In this study, we tested participants' memory for a seemingly shared event and asked them to report their confidence in their answers both individually and jointly. We also explored the relationships between specific individual characteristics, memory, and confidence variables. We have two critical findings apart from replicating the well-evidenced memory conformity effect. First, participants were privately more confident in memory decisions when they did not conform to their cowitness than when they conformed. Conversely, they were publicly more confident in decisions when they conformed than when they did not conform. Second, participants were publicly more confident when they conformed to an incorrect than a correct answer, social outsourcing the information when uncertain. These results indicate that the metacognitive system successfully monitors the social influences on memory, tracks the reliability of information presented by another, and refers to it in context-specific ways (i.e., public vs. private).