The structure and organization of collective memory representations

Abstract

Most collective memory research to date has focused on the temporal distribution of and generational differences in public event representations while not directly addressing the conceptual relationships between different event representations. This study investigates how individuals cluster representations of public events and how sociopolitical identity changes event clustering. Participants judged the similarity of different pairs of key public events and reported their voting behavior. Using multidimensional scaling (MDS), we identified that public events were distinguished based on their political and nonpolitical characteristics; political events were further clustered based on their specific attributes (e.g. power struggles or ethnicity issues). Voting behavior introduced variations into how people clustered political public events. Our findings suggest that collective memories that are formed in relation to a historical and sociopolitical background may be better understood within a network of relationships and at the level of specific cultures/groups rather than at a larger (e.g. national) level.