The social construction of the personal past and its implications for adult development

This article examines conversational recounting about experiences as a potential mechanism by which people socially construct themselves and their worlds over the life span and the resulting implications for understanding adult development. Two principles governing conversational recounting of past events are proposed: coconstruction (the joint influences of speakers and contexts on conversational reconstructions of past events) and consistency (the influence of a conversational reconstruction on subsequent memory). Operating together, the principles provide an account for how autobiographical memory is socially constructed. In addition, the principles may illuminate how conversations about the past can influence the development of identity in adulthood. Conversation is to be thought of as creating a social world just as causality generates a physical one. (Harr6, 1983, p. 65). We live our lives immersed in talk, providing others with stories of what happens to us and ideas about what we think our experi-ences mean. We all remember times when a conversation made a big difference in how we understood an experience, where our listener provided new insights or perspectives, or, in telling, we realized something about ourselves. We may be less aware of more subtle influences of social context on our everyday talk about experiences or of the ways that conversations we have about our experiences shape our memory for our own past (see Vorauer & Miller, 1997). In this article, I explore conversations about expe-riences as a way in which we socially construct our past and our identities. On a metatheoretical level, my goal is to accommodate both social constructivist and more traditional approaches within psy-chology while developing an account of autobiographical remem-bering and adult development. The resulting framework is rooted in research on memory and language (H. H. Clark, 1996; Engel