Interpersonal memory fidelity judgments and social bonding

In interpersonal communication, people monitor other people’s memory to judge its credibility. We assessed whether the quality of the recollection of past events influenced how individuals rated the fidelity of others’ memory and whether ratings of memory fidelity were associated with social attitudes. Participants were presented with two types of memories narrated by another person: either rich recollections or general memories. After each narrative, participants rated how much they think the person has a faithful memory of what happened, whether they would be willing to interact with the narrator, and whether they feel empathy and trust towards the narrator. In two experiments, we found that participants judged memories to more closely match what really happened when the memories contained many specific details. Moreover, higher memory fidelity judgments were associated with more positive social attitudes towards the narrator, suggesting a role for interpersonal memory monitoring in social bonding.