Reaction Paper: "Group Remembering"

The article “Group remembering: Does social loafing underlie collaborative inhibition?” by Mary Susan Weldon, Cassidy Blair, and Penny Dearmin Huebsch is a 2000 publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, volume 26 number 6 from page 1568 to 1577. In this article, Weldon, Blair and Huebsch (2000) sought to gain deeper understanding on the effect of collaboration in group recall on retrieval compared to individual recall. The authors of this study sought to identify the cause of collaborative inhibition in recall by studying the contribution of motivational factors/incentives. The researchers challenge an existing theory that collaboration improves recall since one person’s recall material aids the other individual in recalling, otherwise known as cross-cuing.