Transactive memory

Transactive memory is a psychological hypothesis first proposed by Daniel Wegner in 1985 as a response to earlier theories of "group mind" such as groupthink. A transactive memory system is a mechanism through which groups collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge. Transactive memory was initially studied in and families where individuals had close relationships but was later extended to teams, larger groups, and organizations to explain how they develop a "group mind", a memory system that is more complex and potentially more effective than that of any of its individual constituents. A transactive memory system includes memory stored in each individual, the interactions between memory within the individuals, as well as the processes that update this memory. Transactive memory, on the other hand, is merely the shared store of knowledge.

According to Wegner, a transactive memory system consists of the knowledge stored in each individual's memory combined with metamemory containing information regarding the different teammate's domains of expertise. Just as an individual's metamemory allows him to be aware of what information is available for retrieval, so does the transactive memory system provide teammates with information regarding the knowledge they have access to within the group. Group members learn who knowledge experts are and how to access expertise through communicative processes. In this way, a transactive memory system can provide the group members with more and better knowledge than any individual could access on his own.

Transactive memory was first envisioned by Daniel Wegner in 1985. This concept proposed that when two individuals spend a lot of time around each other and working together, they create a shared store of knowledge between the members. In essence, one member of the couple could store information within their partner and then recall that information by asking their partner about it. This concept was different and unique from other descriptions of socially distributed cognition in that it describes a situation where individuals hold different knowledge compared to shared information, and members of the group engage in transactions to assist in recall of the stored information. In a recent review, Ren and Argote described transactive memory as existing of both a structural component (the linkages of individual memory to the collective) and transactive processes that make the transactive memory dynamic. Wegner first proposed these three processes which occur in groups that lead to the formation and reification of transactive memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval described more below. In a series of experiments, Hollingshead found that romantic partners (who are assumed to have transactive memory) performed better on knowledge recall than dyads and that couples will memorize more words in a list than two strangers when they are rewarded on number of unique words you recall. The explanation for these findings are that couples know how best to remind each other of the knowledge they have, and that couples have a good conception of the other's knowledge and will therefore avoid memorizing words within their partner's domain. Strangers don't have access to this same shared information which leads to poorer performance in these kinds of tasks. Transactive memory was further extended by Diane Liang and colleagues into the realm of work groups. In this work, the development of transactive memory was conceived of as a way to improve group's performance when engaging in interdependent tasks. After this extension, transactive memory became more prolific in organizational behavior among other disciplines.

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