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Social Routes of Influences
Normative influences describes how individuals are likely to weight the costs and benefits of conforming and disagreeing in social situations. It refers to how individuals may make statements that they do not believe, in order to conform to social norms and to gain social acceptance. For example, research has shown that people who have social interactions after an event are more likely to change their thoughts about the event to something other than what they actually witnessed. In one experiment, 60% of participants reported findings that they could not possibly have witnessed. Further highlighting the effects of normative influence, studies have shown that those who are inclined towards social avoidance are less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less likely to experience memory conformity.

Information influences describes how individuals tend to assess their own confidence and recollections as well as others' and conform due to their own uncertainty. For example, people are more likely to conform, if they believe that their information source or partner had more time to learn the materials, better visual acuity, or expressed high confidence in their judgment. One study found that those considered to be high-power individuals are more likely to influence those deemed to be low-power. High-power people are more likely to express themselves and lead discussions, while lower-power individuals will tend to follow and depend upon the more confident individual.

Research has also shown that the strength of a relationship between individuals can affect their levels of conformity as normative and informational routes of influence may come at play. For example, studies exploring levels of conformity between acquaintances and friends, and between strangers and romantic partners show that pairs of individuals with stronger relationships are more susceptible to memory conformity.

Source Monitoring and Social Contagion Errors
Source monitoring errors may also underlie memory distortions such as memory conformity and social contagion errors. When misinformation or information presented from an outside source (e.g., discussions with a partner, another eyewitness, confederate) is presented following an original event (e.g., presentation of study material in the lab, an original event experience, a crime scene), this information may be mistakenly attributed to the the original event rather than the subsequent outside source (e.g., partner or the eyewitness). In turn, this information can later be erroneously recalled when remembering the original event. In experiments including source monitoring tasks where participants were asked to identify the source of their recalled information (i.e., if it is from the study material or their partner), it is found that participants do misattribute information and report it as being from the original studied materials when it was not.

This type of source monitoring error have also been attributed to the misinformation effect found in individuals. In the misinformation effect paradigm, information presented after the encoding of a specific event called post-event information has been suggested to be misattributed to the original event or study material.