Memory and metamemory for social interactions: Evidence for a metamemory expectancy illusion

People do not always have accurate metacognitive awareness of the conditions that lead to good source memory. In Experiment 1, participants studied words referring to bathroom and kitchen items that were either paired with an expected or unexpected room as the source. Participants provided judgments of item and source learning after each item-source pair. In line with previous studies, participants incorrectly predicted their memory to be better for expected than for unexpected sources. Here, we show that this metamemory expectancy illusion generalizes to socially relevant stimuli. In Experiment 2, participants played a prisoner's dilemma game with trustworthy-looking and untrustworthy-looking partners who either cooperated or cheated. After each round of the game, participants provided metamemory judgments about how well they were going to remember the partner's face and behavior. On average, participants predicted their source memory to be better for behaviors that were expected based on the facial appearances of the partners. This stands in contrast to the established finding that veridical source memory is better for unexpected than expected information. Asking participants to provide metamemory judgments at encoding selectively enhanced source memory for the expected information. These results are consistent with how schematic expectations affect source memory and metamemory for nonsocial information, suggesting that both are governed by general rather than by domain-specific principles. Differences between experiments may be linked to the fact that people may have special beliefs about memory for social stimuli, such as the belief that cheaters are particularly memorable (Experiment 3).