Personality and Memory Conformity
Abstract
Abstract. When an individual’s memory for an event is altered by post-event information (PEI) provided by a co-witness, this is known as memory conformity (Wright, Self, & Justice, 2000). The aim of this study was to investigate whether personality characteristics are associated with memory conformity. Ninety-nine participants viewed a crime film and then completed the Ten-Item Personality Questionnaire (TIPI; Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003), a measure of extraversion, openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. Participants then discussed the film with a co-witness who contributed 12 items of post-event information (6 correct, 6 incorrect). Finally, participants completed a film recall questionnaire individually. Significant correlations between personality and memory conformity were found, with decreased openness, extraversion, and neuroticism related to increased reporting of post-event misinformation, increased agreeableness related to increased reporting of accurate post-event information, and decreased conscientiousness and neuroticism related to increased fabrications. These findings suggest that some individuals may be more susceptible to accepting misinformation and reporting errors than others.
References
1997). Intelligence, personality, and interests: Evidence for overlapping traits. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 219–245. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.121.2.219
(2007). Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 150–166. doi: 10.1177/1088868306294907
(2000). Fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and the openness/intellect factor. Journal of Research in Personality, 34, 198–207. doi: 10.1006/jrpe.1999.2276
(1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
(2006).
(Psychologists in the forensic world . In S. I. DonaldsonD. E. BergerK. PezdekEds., The rise of applied psychology: New frontiers and rewarding careers (pp. 880–896). Mahwah, NJ: Routledge.2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880
(1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417–440. doi: 10.1146/annurev.ps.41.020190.002221
(2001). The role of perceptual elaboration and individual differences in the creation of false memories for suggested events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 15, 265–281. doi: 10.1002/acp.701
(2002).
(Individual differences in adults’ suggestibility and memory performance . In M. L. EisenJ. A. QuasG. S. GoodmanEds., Memory & suggestibility in the forensic interview (pp. 205–233). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.2006). Personality factors in human deception detection: Comparing human to machine performance. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Pittsburgh, USA.
(1963). On the dual nature of extraversion. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2, 46–55. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1963.tb00375.x
(2004). Say it to my face: Examining the effects of socially encountered misinformation. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 9, 215–227.
(2005). Is openness to experience an independent personality dimension? Journal of Individual Differences, 26, 132–138. doi: 10.1027/1614-0001.26.3.132
(2003). A very brief measure of the Big Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 504–528. doi: 10.1016/S0092-6566(03)00046-1
(1997).
(Agreeableness: A dimension of personality . In R. HoganEd., Handbook of personality (pp. 795–824). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.1986). The relationship between interrogative suggestibility and acquiescence: Empirical findings and theoretical implications. Personality and Individual Differences, 7, 195–199. doi: 10.1016/0191-8869(86)90055-3
(1987). A parallel form of the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale. The British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 26, 215–221. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1987.tb01348.x
(2004). Compliance and personality: The vulnerability of the Unstable Introvert. European Journal of Personality, 18, 435–443. doi: 10.1002/per.514
(1998). Facet theory: Its development and current status. European Psychologist, 3, 13–36. doi: 10.1027/1016-9040.3.1.13
(1985). Interrogative suggestibility and its relationship with personality, perceptual defensiveness and extraordinary beliefs. Personality and Individual Differences, 6, 765–767. doi: 10.1016/0191-8869(85)90087-X
(2008). Collaborative recall and collective memory: What happens when we remember together? Memory, 16, 213–230. doi: 10.1080/09658210701811862
(1999). Individual differences in imagination inflation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Reivew, 6, 313–318. doi: 10.3758/BF03214120
(2013). Statistical methods for psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
(2000). A heuristic method for estimating the relative weight of predictor variables in multiple regression. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 35, 1–19. doi: 10.1207/S15327906MBR3501_1
(2002). Cognitive and psychosocial correlates of adults’ eyewitness accuracy and suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 49–66. doi: 10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00135-0
(2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12, 361–366. doi: 10.1101/lm.94705
(1978). Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 19–31.
(1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585–589. doi: 10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3
(2000).
(Emotional intelligence from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality . In R. Bar-OnJ. D. A. ParkerEds., The handbook of emotional intelligence (pp. 263–276). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.1987). Validation of the five-factor model across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 81–90.
(1990). Personality in adulthood. New York, NY: Guilford.
(2006). Comparing methods of encountering postevent information: The power of co-witness suggestion. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20, 1083–1099. doi: 10.1002/acp.1261
(2011). Combating co-witness contamination: Attempting to decrease the negative effects of discussion on eyewitness memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25, 43–52. doi: 10.1002/acp.1640
(2015). Crashing memory 2.0: False memories in adults for an upsetting childhood event. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 30, 41–50. doi: 10.1002/acp.3165
(2001). Big Five Factors and Facets and the prediction of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 524–539. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.81.3.524
(2015). Misremembering events: Emotional valence, psychopathic traits, and the misinformation effect. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 31, 189. doi: 10.1007/s11896-015-9178-1
(2000). Predictors of suggestibility and false-memory production in young adult women. Journal of Personality Assessment, 74, 384–399.
(n.d.). A language and environment for statistical computing Retrieved from https://www.R-project.org. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
. (2001). Social contagion of memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 365–371. doi: 10.3758/BF03196174
(2004). The five-factor model and personality disorder empirical literature: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 23, 1055–1085. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2002.09.001
(2011). Relative importance analysis: A useful supplement to regression analysis. Journal of Business and Psychology, 26, 1–9. doi: 10.1007/s10869-010-9204-3
(2015). Acknowledge, repeat, rephrase, elaborate: Witnesses can help each other remember more. Memory, 24(5). doi: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1042884
(1985). Eyewitness performance in different psychological types. The Journal of General Psychology, 112, 191–200. doi: 10.1080/00221309.1985.9711003
(1995).
(Structural equation models with nonnormal variables: Problems and remedies . In S. G. WestJ. F. FinchP. J. CurranR. H. HoyleEds., Structural equation modeling: Concepts, issues, and applications (pp. 56–75). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.1998). Individual differences in susceptibility to memory illusions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12, S5–S27. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0720(199812)12:7<S5::AID-ACP553>3.0.CO;2-D
(2000). Memory conformity: Exploring misinformation effects when presented by another person. British Journal of Psychology, 91, 189–202. doi: 10.1348/000712600161781
(2010). Individual Differences in false memory from misinformation: Cognitive factors. Memory, 18, 543–555. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2010.487051
(2010). Individual differences in false memory from misinformation: Personality characteristics. Personality and Individual Differences, 48, 889–894. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.02.016
(2012). Openness, fluid intelligence, and crystallized intelligence: Toward an integrative model. Journal of Research in Personality, 46, 173–183. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2012.01.002
(