The Power of Collective Memory

Posted on June 29, 2016

Collective memory refers to how groups remember their past. The Chinese remember the century of humiliation, while Americans remember 9/11 and subsequent events, and the people of many nations remember the era of World War II. Collective memories may occur at more local levels, too. Families may remember their history or a particular salient event (e.g., a vacation in an exotic locale). Each of us has some sort of collective memory for any important social group to which we belong. These collective memories can be about facts or about interpretations, as in the remembrance of the embassy bombing.

To understand a country’s memories is to grasp something essential about their national identity and outlook. Of course, countries do not have memories; it is the people in the country who retain the memories, but often there are common themes. When asked to remember World War II, Americans report numerous events, but the majority of people report the attack on Pearl Harbor, D-Day and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Collective remembering implies that collective forgetting also occurs, and we have studied such forgetting in a particular context: how rapidly presidents are forgotten. Virtually every American can name the current president, and when doctors perform a quick neurological assessment of possible stroke or concussion, they ask the name of the current president to determine if cognition is somewhat intact. Because we can assume that the current president is known by virtually 100% of the population, we can then measure the forgetting that occurs when a president leaves office.


Source material from Scientific American