The present study compared the effects of social and semantic elaboration on incidental memory. Two types of lists were provided to the participants: (1) a related list, in which a triplet of words had a common category name associated with each of them, and (2) an unrelated list, in which the three words did not have a common category name. Then, participants in the social elaboration condition generated a particular person’s name, and those in the semantic elaboration condition generated an association elicited by the three words. An unexpected free recall task followed. Results indicated higher recall of the related list in the social elaboration than in the semantic elaboration condition. In contrast, the unrelated list showed no difference between the two elaboration conditions. These results indicate that social elaboration functions as within-item elaboration, which is more effective than semantic elaboration.