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.

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.