Abstract.
University students participated in structured 4-person group
discussions in which they described to the group, and heard other group
members describe, information pertaining to a to-be-made
decision. Beforehand, participants had read all of the
information that they themselves described, but only half of the
information that they heard others describe. It was predicted and
found that, following discussion, participants (a) better remembered
the information that they heard others describe if they had already
read that information prior to discussion, and (b) remembered best of
all the information that they themselves described during
discussion. These results suggest that the often-found tendency
of groups to repeat more of the shared than unshared information that
gets mentioned during unconstrained group discussions may be due in
part to differences that exist in group members' ability to recall
already-mentioned shared vs. unshared information.