The effects of conformity on recognition judgements

Schneider and Watkins (1996) demonstrated that participants' recognition performance can be affected by responses generated by a confederate. However, it remains uncertain whether the confederate's responses actually change the participants' memories or whether participants simply attempt to conform to the confederate. The present experiments examined this issue by having participants complete a final individual recognition test following a recognition test in which the participants worked with a virtual confederate. The results suggest that responses from virtual confederates affect participants' performance in ways similar to actual confederates and that conforming to a virtual confederate's responses does appear to result in actual deficits in memory. More specifically, it impairs participants' ability to correctly recognise material presented earlier.