Biased collective memories and historical overclaiming: An availability heuristic account
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Biased collective memories and historical overclaiming: An availability heuristic account Jeremy K. Yamashiro 1,2
&
Henry L. Roediger III 3
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract People tend to overclaim historical influence for their own ingroup, in a phenomenon called ingroup inflation. Although this overclaiming has been empirically demonstrated in the USA and other nations, the cognitive mechanisms underlying it have been largely conjectural. We test one such proposed mechanism: the application of the availability heuristic to a biased collective memory. Collective memories in the psychological sense are shared memories held individually by members of a group that pertain to their group identity. Using measures of retrieval fluency, we show that asymmetrical accessibility for collective memories favoring ingroup – versus outgroup – relevant historical events is correlated with overclaiming, and that reducing this asymmetry through targeted retrieval of outgroup-relevant events reduces overclaiming (Experiments 1 and 2). We also suggest that ingroup inflation arises because of retrieval fluency per se, rather than more stable asymmetries in knowledge or eventspecific judgments of importance (Experiment 3). Together, these studies suggest some cognitive bases of collective overclaiming and cognitive interventions that might attenuate these biased judgments. Keywords Collective memory . Availability heuristic . Memory . Collective overclaiming . Ingroup inflation
People frequently represent their history through a chauvinistic lens (Roediger et al., 2020). While scholars in the humanistic disciplines of memory studies have documented and theorized this tendency extensively, empirically oriented psychologists have also recently begun inquiring into the role of cognitive bias in lay representations of history (Hirst et al., 2018; Roediger & Abel, 2015). One developing line of research examines ingroup inflation, a bias in
Memory, like war, is often asymmetrical. -Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016), Nothing Ever Dies Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01090-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jeremy K. Yamashiro [email protected] 1
Princeton School for Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
2
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Social Sciences 2, Room 365, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
3
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
judgment in which people reliably attribute more historical influence to their own group than non-group members do (Churchill et al., 2019). Both affective and cognitive factors likely contribute to this collective overclaiming (Putnam et al., 2018). In the current set of studies, we examine one cognitive mechanism conjectured to underly ingroup inflation: the availability heuristic,1 or the rule of thumb by which people make probabilit
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