Researchers are building a framework that treats listeners as evaluators of testimony. People draw on quick, automatic signals such as voice tone and pacing and on more reflective signals like detailed recollections or explicit statements of certainty. Those signals work together to signal how likely a memory is to match reality, and listeners weight them differently depending on context, relationship, and past experience. This view connects memory research with social cognition, communication, and the psychology of trust.
Why this matters for human potential is clear. If we can map how people decide which memories to accept, we can design better ways to share reliable knowledge across communities, reduce harm from misleading reports, and support learners who rely on others’ testimony. The article opens a line of inquiry that touches education, journalism, and care for vulnerable populations. Follow the full piece to see how these ideas could reshape how we build collective knowledge and include more voices in that process.
A fundamental question regarding the human mind is how we derive knowledge from others’ episodic memories, to learn about things we did not experience directly. This learning is vital for understanding the world around us and guides our actions and decisions. We propose a novel framework to investigate how people learn from others’ episodic memories, hypothesizing that in such learning, people take an evaluative stance to avoid acquiring misleading information. Information evaluated as more veridical will be more likely to be learned from. We review the cues used to evaluate others’ memories. These cues may be conveyed and interpreted automatically (e.g., various aspects of prosody), or more deliberatively (e.g., description of recollective content, overt metacognitive claims of certainty or specificity).