Conversational remembering: Story recall with a peer versus for an experimenter

This research investigated the role social context plays in determining the content and organization of remembered information. As a manipulation of social context, subjects talked about a short story either with another subject (dyads) or for an experimenter (experimenter-tested). In addition, the instructions were manipulated: Subjects were asked about their memory of the story or their personal reactions to it. Regardless of instructions, the dyad subjects spoke more about their evaluations of the story, included more comments linking the story to a larger knowledge frame (metacomments), and more often used remembered details to support their positions. In contrast, the experimenter-tested subjects more often included story details and interpretations in narrative accounts of the story. The dyad subjects included in their recalls information that is part of story memory but seldom evidenced by single subjects remembering for an experiment. Thus conversational remembering often relies on a nonnarrative retrieval strategy. Regardless of social context, personal reaction instructions led to more meta-comments and evaluations, and less narrative than memory instructions. The organization and content of non-narrative conversational remembering may be explained by the dual demands of conforming to conversational rules and of establishing social bonds through self-revealing comments.