Collaboration inflation: Egocentric source monitoring errors following collaborative remembering

Following collaborative remembering, people may adopt their partnerʹs contributions as their own memory. In two studies, we asked people to study partially overlapping lists of words. During collaborative remembering, dyads either worked to include all words no matter who studied them or limited recall to only words studied by both dyad members. This differential focus on source information during collaborative recall impacted performance on a later source memory test. Nonetheless we found frequent source monitoring errors that displayed an egocentric bias. People were more likely to claim their partnerʹs contributions as their own memories than attribute their memories to their partners. In collaborative remembering, people work to construct an agreed upon version of the past that quickly becomes each individualʹs memory.