Building a collective memory: the case for collective forgetting

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.002

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 23, October 2018, Pages 88-92

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.002 Get rights and content

Highlights

•
Studying collective memory involves exploring how individual memories become shared.
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Selective remembering produces selective forgetting for both speakers and listeners.
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The effects at the dyadic level can shape emergent outcomes at the community level.

The shared reality of a community rests in part on the collective memories held by members of that community. Surprisingly, psychologists have only recently begun to study collective memories, an area of interest in the social sciences for several decades. The present paper adopts the perspective that remembering is often an act of communication. One consequence of communicative acts of remembering is that speaker and listeners can come to share the same memories, thereby providing a foundation on which to build a collective memory. Another consequence is that the selectivity of communicative acts of remembering can induce collective selective forgetting, clearly one component of any collective memory. The phenomenon of retrieval-induced forgetting is discussed in the context of dyadic conversational exchanges of unrelated individuals and conversational exchanges between ingroup and outgroup members. In addition, the paper reviews work demonstrating that what occurs at the dyadic level can shape global outcomes of complex social networks, including convergence of memories across a network. The bottom-up approach described in this paper can help us understand how individual memories can come to be shared across a community.

Section snippets

Studying collective memory from a psychological perspective

Since Halbwachs's [2] groundbreaking work from the early 20th century, social scientists have studied collective memory by examining the role society plays in their formation and maintenance. For instance, scholars have examined the political context in which monuments are built and the way in which these monuments are reassessed as the political climate of a community changes (e.g., [3, 4]). Psychologists have largely approached the topic differently. Given their disciplinary inclinations,

A distinctively human way of remembering the past

We want to focus here on a distinctively human way of communicating about the past. Rather than just conveying new information to others, people will often talk to each other about things they already know. Just as Echterhoff et al. [1] underscored that people are motivated to create a shared reality for both epistemic and relational reasons, so also are people inclined to talk about a shared past to others for similar reasons. Faculty members jointly try to remember what was said at the last

Collective forgetting

Why does conversational remembering increase mnemonic convergence? (See [8^•] for an extensive discussion of this question.) One possible mechanism is reinforcement: because conversational remembering is inevitably selective [12, 13], what is mentioned will be reinforced, for both speaker and listeners, making it more accessible in the future [14, 15, 16]. Another possibility is that the selectivity of conversational remembering will selectively induce forgetting in speakers and listeners. This

Community-specificity of SSRIF

As we noted, collective memories are community-specific. Consequently, the cognitive mechanisms that govern their formation should be constrained in such a way that they promote the formation of a collective memory within a community as opposed to across communities. This appears to be the case for RIF, in that SSRIF is more robust when speaker and listener are members of the same group. This within-group bias occurs, presumably, because listeners are more motivated to concurrently retrieve if

Beyond the dyad

The just discussed research focuses almost exclusively on dyadic communicative interactions. Will the dynamics occurring at the dyadic level shape what occurs at a community level? (See [34] for a general discussion of a generative social science approach to community-wide behavior.) Several lines of research have explored this question as applied to collective memory. Using an innovative methodology that allowed them to examine experimentally established larger social networks, Coman et al. [35

Conclusion

In the beginning of this paper, we presented a challenge: to account for why communicative remembering among individuals would lead to shared memories specific to members of one community and not necessarily another. We addressed this issue by examining how selective remembering might lead to collective selective forgetting. Not only do speaker and listeners experience similar induced forgetting following selective remembering, this selective retrieval-induced forgetting is more robust when

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

• of special interest

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of NSF grants BCS-0819067 and LSS-1423727 to the first author and NSF grant BCS-1748285 to the second.

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View full text

Building a collective memory: the case for collective forgetting

Highlights

Section snippets

Studying collective memory from a psychological perspective

A distinctively human way of remembering the past

Collective forgetting

Community-specificity of SSRIF

Beyond the dyad

Conclusion

Conflict of interest statement

References and recommended reading

Acknowledgements

Trends Cog Sci

Persp Psych Sci

Shared reality: experiencing commonality with others’ inner states about the world

Persp Psych Sci

On Collective Memory

Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America

Towards a psychology of collective memory

Memory

Social aspects of forgetting

Remembering in conversations: the social sharing and reshaping of memories

Ann Rev Psych

The seven sins of memory: insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience

Am Psychol

Putting the social back in human memory

Building consensus about the past: schema consistency and convergence in socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting

Memory

A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: the case of memory

Cog Syst Res

Learning and remembering with others: the key role of retrieval in shaping group recall and collective memory

Soc Cog

The role of repeated retrieval in shaping collective memory

Forgetting the presidents

Science

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility

Remembering can cause forgetting: retrieval dynamics in long-term memory

J Exp Psychol Learn Memory Cogn

A progress report on the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting

Mem Cog