Log In | Sign Up | Help
Upload_transparent

Collective representations elicit widespread individual false memories

de Vito S, Cubelli R, Della Sala S.

Cortex. 2009 May;45(5):686-7.

  • Send This
  • Add_to_favs_transparent
  • Embed
  • Download
  • Flag
  • Add to Favorites
``

Your document does not seem to be indexed by any search engines yet. Be patient, they'll come!

Latest Searches Leading to this Doc

Document Information

518 Views | 0 Downloads | 1 Like | 0 Comments | 0 Favorites

Added By
Description

de Vito S, Cubelli R, Della Sala S.

Cortex. 2009 May;45(5):686-7.

Pdf_16x16 2 Pages


Date Added

about 3 hours ago

Category
Tags
Groups
Copyright

Attribution Non-commercial

More info »

 

cortex 45 (2009) 686–687 available at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex Letter to Cortex Collective representations elicit widespread individual false memories Stefania de Vitoa,c, Roberto Cubellib,* and Sergio Della Salaa a Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK ` Dipartimento di Scienze della Cognizione e della Formazione, Centro interdipartimentale Mente/Cervello, Universita di Trento, Italy c Laboratorio di Psicologia Sperimentale, Suor Orsola Benincasa University, Napoli, Italy b It is well known that the need to simplify a story, to preserve its consistency and to avoid discontinuity gaps, leads to memory distortions (Schacter, 2001). These biases allow one to preclude possible dissonances between the accurate recollection of past events and one’s own current knowledge or present situations upon which one should act. While most memories are specific to individuals, there are memories that are shared by entire groups of people who are homogeneous for social, ethnic and cultural characteristics or are connected by a common experience of a given event. The social nature of these collective memories is testified not only by their content, but also by the way in which they are fabricated. These memories are prone to ‘‘mental filters’’ (Zerubavel, 2003) which influence the mental representations of the events. These mental filters are instrumental in introducing modifications (e.g., inserting or omitting details) when members of the relevant group are asked to reconstruct the original event or the circumstances surrounding it, thus eliciting false memories which may reify as settled symbols. In turns, commemorations and symbols would frame any subsequent observations distorting their recollection to reconcile them with the frozen shared knowledge. Should individual distortions concerning a shared public event overlap, they would result in the formation of a distorted collective memory. The present study examined memories concerning one of the worst and deadliest terrorist attacks in Italian history, the Bologna massacre. On the morning of August 2nd, 1980, at 10.25, a bomb exploded in the main station of Bologna, Italy. Eighty-five people died and over 200 were wounded (see http:// www.stragi.it/index.php). A large clock on the outside wall of the main building broke during the explosion (see Fig. 1). Soon after, it was repaired and continued working for the next 16 years. The picture of the clock with its hands fixed at 10.25 became the symbol of the event, and as such is reproduced on posters and banners during each annual commemoration. In 1996 the clock stopped working, and it was decided to set it permanently at 10.25, as a remembrance symbol. It has been noted anecdotally that people remember the clock as having been always set at the time of the explosion (Tota, 2003) showing a possible effect of a strong social symbolic representation on the accuracy of personal memories. We administered individually a formal questionnaire to 180 healthy participants (90 males and 90 females) aged 54.39 (SD 7.7, range: 46–67) familiar with the Bologna station or working there inquiring on their knowledge of the event. The relevant questions focused on whether interviewees remembered the clock working normally or as set at the explosion time during the 16 years in which it had been working. Of the 173 participants who knew that the clock is now stopped, 160 (92%) stated that the clock has always been broken. 127 (79%) further claimed to have seen it always set at 10.25, including all 21 railway employees. Most interviewees did not know that the clock had been working for over 16 years and stated that it had always been broken. From the 173 people who knew that at the time of testing the clock was stopped, a subgroup of 56 citizens who regularly take part in the annual official commemoration of the event has been further considered: only six (11%) of them correctly remember that the clock had been working in the past. * Corresponding author. Dipartimento di Scienze della Cognizione e della Formazione, Centro interdipartimentale Mente/Cervello, ` Universita di Trento, Corso Bettini 31, I-38068 Rovereto (TN), Italy. E-mail address: roberto.cubelli@unitn.it (R. Cubelli). 0010-9452/$ – see front matter ª 2008 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2008.08.002 cortex 45 (2009) 686–687 687 Fig. 1 – The clock at the Bologna railway station stopped at 10.25 to mark the time of the terroristic massacre. These data indicate that individual memory distortions shared by a large group of people develop into collective false memories. The particular memory distortion that we report appears to be induced by the overwhelming symbolism associated to the clock fixed at the time of the explosion. Indeed the picture of the clock stopped at 10.25 became the icon representing the event, on book covers, web pages, newspapers and magazines, posters, and other media. Therefore, the symbol acted as suggestive information and obscured the real experience of seeing the clock working, either as a misleading cue at retrieval or as catalysis for a semantic representation drawn from weak encoding. The urge for consistency may play a role in this phenomenon (Schacter, 2001) and determine the obliteration or the inaccessibility of a long period between the immediate effects of the explosion and the known current status of the clock. This study contributes to our understanding of memory as a reconstructive phenomenon: An emotionally loaded symbol acts as post-event misleading information and obscures the real experience leading to widespread individual forgetting which results in a collective memory distortion. In sum, both individual failures in remembering and collective attempts to produce stable symbols can be considered the likely basis for the development of pervasive and consistent false memories. The episode of the Bologna massacre per se proved to be subject to false memories (Cubelli and Della Sala, 2008), known to mar flash-bulb memories (e.g., Pezdek, 2003) even if they enjoy an exceptionally high level of confidence (Talarico and Rubin, 2003). The focus of the current study was not to test memories associated to a unique and emotionally loaded event. Rather its aim was to assess the recollection of subsequent instances (i.e., the clock working normally for a long spell of time) involving the object which has become the emblem of the event itself. Although it was immediately repaired and functioned until 1996, most interviewees appeared to misremember the fact even if they had plenty of opportunities to see the clock, either because they used trains regularly or because they worked at the station. Also the interviewees who declared particular interest and emotional attachment to the event were prone to the same false recollection. references Cubelli R and Della Sala S. Flashbulb memories: special but not iconic. Cortex, 44: 908–909, 2008. Pezdek K. Event memory and autobiographical memory for the events of September 11, 2001. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17: 1033–1045, 2003. Schacter DL. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Talarico JM and Rubin DC. Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories. Psychological Science, 14: 455–461, 2003. ` Tota AL. La Citta ferita. Memoria e comunicazione Pubblica della Strage di Bologna, 2 agosto 1980. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Zerubavel E. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.