TY - JOUR
T1 - Building a collective memory
T2 - the case for collective forgetting
AU - Hirst, William
AU - Coman, Alin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2018/10
Y1 - 2018/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.002
DO - 10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.002
M3 - Review article
C2 - 29459336
AN - SCOPUS:85042257424
SN - 2352-250X
VL - 23
SP - 88
EP - 92
JO - Current Opinion in Psychology
JF - Current Opinion in Psychology
ER -