• Citer

Do public speeches induce “collective” forgetting?: The Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech as a case study

par Stone, Charles B.;Luminet, Olivier ;Jay, Alexander C.;Klein, Olivier ;Licata, Laurent ;Hirst, William
Référence Memory Studies
Publication Publié, 2020-03-01

Article révisé par les pairs

• Accès en ligne
• Détails
• Contenu
• Statistiques

Résumé :

Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon – socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting – helps explain the mnemonic consequences associated with political speeches, in this case, the Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech. To this end, we analyzed the responses of 43 French-speakers and 49 Dutch-speakers. Of these individuals 35 of them attended to the speech (16 French-speakers; 19 Dutch-speakers). Our results suggest that the Belgian King’s speech induced French-speaking Belgians who attended the speech to recall less information related to what the King mentioned in the speech. We found no such deficit for Dutch-speaking Belgians. Rather, the Dutch-speaking Belgians exhibited greater recall of related and unrelated information. These results bolster the importance of including a psychological approach in the study of collective memories and the moderating role of social identity.