When you are in a group, you tend to be more active. It is your human urge to relate to the society around you that adds to your activity. Previously, group thinking or group discussions were related to brainstorming. Organizations have greatly encouraged this technique as an effective mode of idea generation.
And now a recent study has claimed that group-think can enable you to recall things that never took place, very easily. To prove the same researchers from Britain and Israel made use of a false-memory test and a brain scanning technology. The so-called false memories were created by allowing small groups of subjects to watch a documentary.
The researchers then tried to check their individual memories with the experience. The researchers asked them how confident they were regarding the correctness of their answers. Again, they intended to make the subjects to switch over to incorrect answers by exerting group influence on them.
It was found that in almost 70 percent of the time, people believed in their false memory and 40 percent among them kept on remembering it. It was observed that individuals in a group tried to respond in the same way as the other members of the group. Researchers believe that the finding can benefit certain legal cases in which eyewitnesses often control the juries.
So what is the actual logic behind such a finding? Social influence can control memory traces and it may even create false memories which may last for a long term. The brain takes part in this process by stimulating the regions which are in charge of regulating emotions, memory processing and social interactions.
