The structure and organization of collective memory representations

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the structure and organization of collective memories. In three studies, we specifically explored the semantic relationships between the public event representations. In the first study, participants were asked to rate the similarity of different pairs of 15 public events (Tekcan et al., 2017). They were also asked to report for which political party they had voted in the most recent election. In the second study, by employing the same methodology, we assessed whether the structure and organization of collective memory representations remained stable across three waves of data collection: May 2016, November 2016, and August 2017. Using Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), we consistently found that people represented public events by distinguishing the events’ political and nonpolitical characteristics, and clustering the political events according to their specific attributes. Findings also suggest that voting behavior influenced how people perceived and interpreted public events while linking them to each other. Finally, despite a substantial stability in the organization of collective memories across three time points, there were changes in a particular group those of which members were closer to the governing political party. These findings suggest that collective memories may be associatively organized and that political identity may impact the organization of collective memories. In the third study, performance in identifying a public event was not facilitated when preceded by a related public event rather than an unrelated public event. We discussed this finding in relation to lessons learned from this experiment and suggestions for the future studies of collective memory.