Dr. Tori Peña discussed some of her work on how people shape each other’s memories and imagination of the future of the United States. She reviewed work she did examining chat-based collaboration (Greeley et al., 2022). She also discussed her work experimentally testing whether people can imagine a more positive future for the future of the United States (Peña & Rajaram, in press).
In Experiment 1, online participants studied a word list and, in a chatroom, recalled the words either alone (as controls) or with two other participants. Surprisingly, collaborative inhibition – the robust finding of lower recall in collaborative groups than controls – disappeared. This outcome occurred because participants who worked alone recalled less than what we see in in-person studies. In Experiment 2, where instructions were modified and an experimenter was present, individual performance improved, resulting in collaborative inhibition.