Justifying Atrocities

Coman, Alin; Stone, Charles B.; Hirst, William

doi:10.1177/0956797614531024

Cited by 36 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…We should caution that SSRIF is not inevitable when group membership is both shared and salient. In a study aimed at exploring the mechanisms by which moral disengagement strategies affect social remembering, Coman, Stone, Castano, and Hirst (2014) examined American listeners attending to American speakers' accounts of atrocities in which previously studied justifications went unmentioned. They found SSRIF for the justifications when the perpetrators of the atrocities were Iraqis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social identity and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting: The effects of group membership.

Coman

Hirst

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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In a conversation, speakers and listeners will often influence each other's memories, and in doing so, promote the formation of a shared, or collective, memory. One means by which a mnemonic consensus emerges is through socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SSRIF). When listeners attend to the speakers' selective retrieval of previously encountered events, they forget unmentioned but related information more than they forget unrelated, unmentioned previously studied information. As a consequence, both speaker and listeners come to remember-and forget-the event in a similar way. SSRIF appears to be dependent on listeners concurrently retrieving the information with the speaker. We asked here whether such concurrent retrieval is a function of group membership, thereby underscoring the connection between a basic mnemonic mechanism-retrieval-induced forgetting-and a social function of communicative interaction-building a shared representation. In Experiment 1, Princeton students listening to a speaker selectively recall previously studied material showed SSRIF when the speaker was identified as a fellow Princeton student, but not when he or she was identified as a Yale student. In Experiment 2, activating a common student identity before the listening task triggered concurrent retrieval in Princeton students when listening to both Princeton and Yale speakers. Thus, similar patterns of selective forgetting are more likely to occur between speakers and listeners if they belong to the same social group. Basic mnemonic mechanisms seem to be adapted to promote the emergence of shared mnemonic representations that preserve group membership and group identity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social identity and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting: The effects of group membership.

Coman

Hirst

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…The former process is known as within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WIRIF), and the latter as socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SSRIF, Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007;Stone, Barnier, Sutton, & Hirst, 2010, 2013. Built off of the retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm (RIF; Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994), researchers examining SSRIF have found such forgetting for a number of different stimuli, including stories (Cuc et al, 2007;Stone et al, 2010), autobiographical memories (Stone et al, 2013), flashbulb memories (Coman, Manier, & Hirst, 2009); academic material (Koppel et al, 2014), medical information (Coman, Coman, & Hirst, 2013), beliefs (Vlasceanu & Coman, 2018), atrocities (Coman, Stone, Castano, & Hirst, 2014), and controversial topics (i.e., euthanasia; . As this research makes clear, SSRIF is a robust phenomenon.…”

Section: Socially Shared Retrieval-induced Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Editors’ Introduction: Remembering With Others: Conversational Dynamics and Mnemonic Outcomes

Bietti

Stone

2019

Topics in Cognitive Science

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Remembering the past through conversations with others is a uniquely human endeavor. Conversational remembering consists of specific dynamics and can lead to mnemonic outcomes. While conversational dynamics refer to the interactive processes (e.g., the roles speakers and listeners may undertake during the conversation) shaping collaborative remembering, conversational outcomes are about the mnemonic and functional consequences (e.g., forging social bonds) of those processes. Thus, the aim of the present article is to introduce the reader to key concepts and paradigms that have been rigorously developed to empirically investigate the dynamics and outcomes of conversational remembering in cognitive research. The collected review and empirical articles gathered in this topic provide the state‐of‐the‐art in the field.

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“…This desire for greater social distance toward groups deemed different from oneself may additionally be nourished by the general tendency to perceive one's outgroup as more homogeneous and one's ingroup as more heterogeneous (Mullen & Hu, 1989), which may also occur in personal narratives. Indeed, personal historical memories have been found to be biased in favor of one's ingroup and against other groups (Blatz & Ross, 2009;Coman, Stone, Castano, & Hirst, 2014;Welzer et al, 2002). This ingroup preference may further be influenced by the salience of one's own and others' group identity when reminiscing about the shared past (Coman & Hirst, 2015).…”

Section: Narrative Meaning Making and Social Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Echoes of the Past: Meaning Making in Congolese Narratives Relates to Their Social Distance Attitudes Toward Europeans

Köber

Weihofen

Rennstich

2017

Imagination, Cognition and Personality

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Narrative identity is not only based on the personal past but also informed by one's historical and political past. Beside the fact that this has been shown mostly in Western samples, it is unknown how placing personal narratives within the context of an ethnic and political heritage relates to other cognitive processes, such as social attitudes. Therefore, this study explores narratives about encounters with Europeans in a Congolese sample to study the impact of their meaning on their social distance attitudes toward Europeans. Separate hierarchical regression models revealed that social distance is predicted by closure and redemption, and by the perceived heterogeneity of whiteness, but not by contamination. Yet, narratives with both low levels of closure and contamination predict greater social distance. Surprisingly, commitment to own ethnic identity was not found to be a significant predictor. Results are discussed in terms of narrative identity, historical memories, and social cognition.

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Justifying Atrocities

Cited by 36 publications

References 18 publications

Social identity and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting: The effects of group membership.

Social identity and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting: The effects of group membership.

Editors’ Introduction: Remembering With Others: Conversational Dynamics and Mnemonic Outcomes

Echoes of the Past: Meaning Making in Congolese Narratives Relates to Their Social Distance Attitudes Toward Europeans

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