Living Historical Memory: Associations with National Identity, Social Dominance Orientation, and System Justification in 40 Countries

Relationship of living historical memories and news source with national identity: A latent class analysis

“…In addition to exclusion due to missingness, only participants who were 16 years of age or older were included in the current study. Data were collected online, stratified by age, gender, and income from December 6, 2018 to January 24, 2019 (for detailed method and sampling procedure, see Liu et al, 2020).…”

“…Historical events like those mentioned earlier are socially represented by the group as collective memories (Hilton & Liu, 2017;Liu & Hilton, 2005). This kind of social representation of history by a group, termed communicative memories (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995, p. 126) or living historical memories (Liu et al, 2020), guide individuals to form identities and political attitudes toward their nations or ethnic groups (Hilton & Liu, 2017;Liu & Hilton, 2005;Liu & László, 2007;Wodak, De Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 1999). For example, Pólya (2017) asked Hungarian participants to write narratives of the nation's history, and subsequently coded the narratives as either positive or negative.…”

Implications of a Psychological Approach to Collective Remembering: Social Representations as Cultural Ground for Interpreting Survey and Experimental Results

“…Drawing from the same multinational data set, the overall results of which are reported in Liu et al (2021) and Choi et al (2021), is a study from Finland, another European country that had a difficult relationship with the Soviet Union for significant parts of the 20th century. But as a Scandinavian country, Finland did not experience the same level of overall historical trauma over the course of recent centuries as Hungary.…”

“…Moscovici’s (1988) brief description of a hegemonic social representation seems insufficient to describe the contestation and rhetorical dynamics surrounding the most freely recalled events in various nations’ social representations of history. The differential roles of cultural memories (typically of a nation’s foundation) and communicative (or living historical) memories in this process are only beginning to be understood, and should be a subject for future research (for an overview, see Choi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2021). The relationship of historical charters to schematic narrative templates (see Vincze et al.’s article) also needs to be elaborated.…”

“…Although not all of the articles in this special issue make this explicit, in many ways, psychological research on collective remembering provides a bridge between research in the humanities and social sciences that is effectively case studies on the public memory of material things encountered in social life and research in experimental psychology that focuses on the content-free recall of discrete (and predominantly artificial and/or inconsequential) bits of information (for a more in-depth discussion of these issues, see Neisser & Winograd, 1988). Kansteiner (2002) famously called for more research on the reception side of collective memory—that is, to actually test how people receive top-down directives from the powers that be, such as state-sponsored commemorations (e.g., independence days or memorial days), and whether these impact on national identities in the way they are theorized to do (e.g., see Liu et al., 2021). Several of the articles in this special issue test these theories and predictably report mixed results, which we will attempt to interpret through a more comprehensive theoretical lens than those used within the individual articles.…”