Do public speeches induce “collective” forgetting? The Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech as a case study
(2022) Memory Studies — Vol. 15, n° 4, p. 713-730 (2022)
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- Abstract
- 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.
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Stone, C. B., Luminet, O., Jay, A. C. V., Klein, O., Licata, L., & Hirst, W. (2022). Do public speeches induce “collective” forgetting? The Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech as a case study. Memory Studies, 15(4), 713-730. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019900949 (Original work published 2022)