“Remembering” World War II and Willingness to Fight

Abstract

Students from 22 nations answered a survey on the most important events in world history. At the national level, free recalling and a positive evaluation of World War II (WWII) were associated with World Values Survey willingness to fight for the country in a war and being a victorious nation. Willingness to fight, a more benign evaluation of WWII, and recall of WWII were associated with nation-level scores on power distance and low postmaterialism, suggesting that values stressing obedience and competition between nations are associated with support for collective violence, whereas values of expressive individualism are negatively related. Internal political violence was unrelated to willingness to fight, excluding direct learning as an explanation of legitimization of violence. Recall of wars in general (operationalized by WWI recall) was also unrelated to willingness to fight. Results replicate and extend Archer and Gartner's classic study showing the legitimization of violence by war to the domain of collective remembering.

The Contagion of Interstate Violence

“…Gilovich (1981) showed that priming Americans with a war that was perceived as just and successful (i.e., WWII), compared with unsuccessful (i.e., Vietnam War), military interventions increased their support for military interventions in unrelated, future international crises. Similarly, other research has found a positive association between citizens' willingness to fight in a new war and their country's victorious or positive experiences in WWII (Basabe & Valencia, 2007;Paez et al, 2008). Bobowik and colleagues' (2014) recent study, however, failed to find converging evidence for the direct effect of a country's type of involvement (victory or defeat) in historical wars on support for future collective violence.…”

A cultural psychological analysis of collective memory as mediated action: Constructions of Indian history

“…To do so, we extended a common technique of research on social representations of history (Liu et al, 2005;Páez et al, 2008), by combining it with a situation sampling method that previous researchers developed to study the mutual constitution of psychological tendencies and everyday realities (Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997;Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto, 2002). The first step of our method comes directly from research about social representations of history (e.g., Liu et al, 2005).…”

Tripwires and free-riders: Do forward-deployed U.S. troops reduce the willingness of host-country citizens to fight for their country?

“…4. A handful of empirical studies have investigated the determinants of war willingness (Anderson, Getmansky, & Hirsch-Hoefler, in press;Diener & Tov, 2007;Inglehart et al, 2015;Jakobsen et al, 2016;Paez et al, 2008;Puranen, 2014;Torgler, 2003). One of these, while focusing mainly on the impact of regime type, also includes a dummy for the presence of US troops (with a 1,000-troops threshold), which, in their multilevel analysis, is shown to suppress war willingness somewhat (Jakobsen et al, 2016).…”

“…Some argue, for example, that a "culture of peace" has become an internalized trait of most rich and democratic societies (De Rivera, 2004;Huth & Allee, 2002;Rummel, 1995). Germany and Japan, both rich and both democratic, are often highlighted as standout examples of countries whose "shared historic experiences" (Puranen, 2014, p. 270)-that is to say, violent imperial expansion followed by resounding defeat in the Second World War (Paez et al, 2008)-have helped shape and maintain a "postwar culture of anti-militarism" (Berger, 1993, p. 120). Others argue to the contrary, that the alleged pacifism among World War II losers can be better explained by the fact that U.S. security guarantees, and specifically the forward-deployment of U.S. troops, essentially substitute for domestic defense efforts (Lind, 2004;Midford, 2002).…”