Retelling urban legends.

We explored factors influencing the retelling of urban legends. As predicted by prior work, people retold truthful and scary stories. But people also retold well-known stories. This contrasts with the expectation that people would not pass on a story that everyone already knew. Also as predicted by prior work, repeating a story increased its credibility. But repeating also increased a story's importance, scariness, and likelihood of retelling. In general, contextualizing a story and increasing the number of details did not affect the likelihood of retelling a story. The exception was that details increased the likelihood of retelling a newly heard story. However, if people read a story with context or details, more contextual elements and details were included in their retellings. At the same time, people confabulated details to an equal degree no matter what type of embellishments they had read.

Collective memory: collaborative and individual processes in remembering.

Two experiments compared collaborative and individual recall. In Experiment 1, participants encoded pictures and words with a deep or shallow processing task, then recalled them twice either individually or collaboratively. Collaborative groups recalled more than individuals, but less than nominal groups (pooled individuals), thus exhibiting collaborative inhibition. However, group recall appeared to be more stable over time than individual recall. Groups and individuals both showed a picture-superiority effect, a level-of-processing effect, and hypermnesia. In Experiment 2, participants recalled the story "War of the Ghosts" (from F. C. Bartlett, 1932), and again collaborative groups recalled more than individuals, but less than nominal groups. Both the individual and collaborative recalls were highly organized. There was evidence that the collaborative groups tended to rely on the best individual to a greater extent in story than in list recall. Possible social and cognitive mechanisms are considered.