Interpersonal Closeness Impairs Decision Memory

We hypothesized that self-other confusion as a result of interpersonal closeness impairs people's memory of their own decisions. Four studies (min N = 352) tested whether closeness affects memory in cooperative decisions. Participants played trust games in which they entrusted resources to another person and then had to recall their own decisions. Study 1 showed that people with an independent self-construal recalled their decisions more accurately, suggesting that less self-other overlap results in higher accuracy. Studies 2-4 showed that people made more recall errors when they played the trust game with a close in comparison with a distant partner. The findings suggest that interpersonal closeness impairs people's memory of cooperative decisions