Alin Coman

Sacred or protected values have important influences on decision making, particularly in the context of intergroup disputes. Thus far, we know little about the process of a value becoming sacred or why one person may be more likely than another to hold a sacred value. We present evidence that participation in religious ritual and perceived threat to the group lead people to be more likely to consider preferences as protected or sacred values.

Abstract Silence about the past permeates acts of remembering, with marked mnemonic consequences. Mnemonic silence���the absence of expressing a memory���is public in nature and is embedded within communicative acts, such as conversations. As such, silence has the potential to affect both speakers���the source of the silence���and listeners���those attending to the speaker. Although the topic of silence is widely discussed, it is rarely mentioned in the empirical literature on memory.

As the papers in this volume make clear, the psychological study of memory can have a profound impact on the law, particularly with respect to the veracity of eyewitness testimony (see also Loftus, 1996; Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006). Less appreciated is the role the psychology of memory might play in understanding how juries remember the testimony presented in a trial during their deliberations.

People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychologi- cal research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (trans- active memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative inhibition, information sampling biases, and audience tuning). We next examine how conversational remembering affects subsequent memory. Here, we address influences on listeners’ memory through social conta- gion, resistance to such influences, and then retrieval/reexposure effects on either speaker or listener, with a focus on retrieval-induced forget- ting. Extending the perspective beyond single interactions, we consider work that has explored how the above effects can spread across networks of several individuals. We also explore how a speaker’s motive to form a shared reality with listeners can moderate conversational effects on memory. Finally, we discuss how these various conversational effects may promote the formation of collective memories.

Although a burgeoning literature has shown that practice effects and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting can reshape the memories of speakers and listeners involved in a conversation, it has generally failed to examine whether such effects can propagate through a sequence of conversational interactions. This lacuna is unfortunate, since sequences of social interactions are more common than single, isolated ones. The present research explores how people exposed to attitudinally biased selective practice propagate the practice and forgetting effects into subsequent conversations with attitudinally similar and dissimilar others and, through these conversations, affect subsequent acts of remembering. The research establishes that the propagation of retrieval-induced forgetting and practice effects is transitive. It also determines when attitude influences propagation. These findings are discussed in the context of the formation of collective memories.