The social contagion of memory for strongly- and weakly-associated word Pairs

Abstract

The present thesis investigated the effect of social contagion paradigm on the different levels of association strength words. The aim is to provide a new insight of how qualitative aspects of memory items impact social contagion. As not all memory items are intrinsically similar, it is important to investigate whether certain types of memory items will lead to greater/lesser social contagion effects. In the present study, participants were exposed to false information. Original target words were changed to the new words that created a strong or weak association with the original target word by a typical participant (i.e. social) or a computer manipulation (i.e. nonsocial). We conducted one experiment with fifty-eight Boğaziçi University undergraduates. Participants were compared in a recognition test to determine how they were impacted by association strength levels when the socially given information is wrong. Association strength effects emerged in false alarms but not in hits. Only unrelated false alarms were significantly lower than weak pairs and strong pairs. This suggests that certain types of words may be more prone to the effect of social contagion. Moreover, the source of false information did not affect the participants’ responses and hits and false alarms did not differ across social and nonsocial conditions. Therefore, future work is needed to clarify the elements of social source.