What’s ours is yours: recall of history for lesser-known countries is guided by one’s own national history

ABSTRACT

The present studies examine how people recall history. Sometimes, certain national histories are well known and sometimes they are not. We propose that, under certain circumstances, culturally distinctive representations of typical national histories can be used to guide recall, particularly in cases where the history is not well known. We focus on three national samples with varied levels of knowledge about each history: Great Britain, India, and the United States. In Study 1, we establish typical historical event templates for each nation consisting of events that a large proportion of participants from each sample identify as important in a typical nation’s history. We examine points of divergence between the different groups’ typical event templates and the valences of these events. In Study 2, we test and find that, in conditions of less knowledge, participants tend to refer to particular historical events that coincide with events unique to their own group’s typical history. In Study 3, we demonstrate that this effect can be found even when a group possesses a reasonable amount of knowledge about the target country. We conclude by discussing the implications in relation to how such a retrieval strategy might inform interpretations of events in the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Lay historian
• social memory
• retrieval strategy
• national history

Acknowledgement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, T. G. Cyr, upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Timeline data and country age estimates are not reported here, as the results are not germane to the present work.

2 In the process of coding we confined ourselves to the content of the words expressed by the participants and did not attempt to draw parallels or make inferences about what a participant may have meant. For example, conceptually, “achieving independence” and “changing leaders” could indeed be related. However, if a participant wrote “independence”, we did not attempt to intuit whether a participant might have also meant “changing leaders”.

3 Analyses associated with year of occurrence are not reported here, as the results are not germane to the present study.