No Differences in Memory Performance for Instances of Historical Victimization and Historical Perpetration: Evidence from Five Large-Scale Experiments

In their pursuit of a moral ingroup identity, groups tend to flatter and deceive themselves, leading to predictable biases in their collective memory. Specifically, such memory biases are expected in the form of worse memory for morally problematic acts of historical perpetration. In five high-powered recall and recognition experiments (N = 3424) using between- (Studies 1—4) and within-subjects designs (Study 5), and historically accurate (all studies), randomly sampled (Studies 3—4) stimulus material in three contexts (Germany, the UK, the U.S.), we tested whether individual memories of collective events can be distorted not only in a way that attenuates ingroup-threatening perpetration information but also in a way that highlights morally affirming victimhood information. Deviating from expectations, none of our studies revealed significant differences in memory performance depending on the ingroup’s role as victim or perpetrator. Instead, equivalence testing (Studies 4—5) even rejected the presence of the minimal effect size we defined to support the proposed memory bias. We discuss the implications of this absence of individual memory distortions for the formation of social representations of history.

在追求道德内群体认同的过程中，群体往往夸大其词并欺骗自己，导致其集体记忆出现可预测的偏差。具体而言，这种记忆偏差预期将以对历史上道德问题行为的记忆下降的形式出现。通过五项高强度的回忆和识别实验（N = 3424），采用跨组（研究1—4）和组内（研究5）设计，以及历史准确性（所有研究），在三个语境（德国、英国、美国）中随机抽取的（研究3—4）刺激材料，我们测试了个体对集体事件的记忆是否能够被扭曲，不仅是在一种削弱内群体威胁性行为信息的方式，而且是在一种凸显道德认可受害者信息的方式。出乎意料的是，我们的研究并没有发现，根据内群体作为受害者或施害者的角色，记忆表现存在显著差异。相反，等效性测试（研究4—5）甚至否定了我们定义的最小效应量，该效应量旨在支持所提出的记忆偏差。我们讨论了个体记忆扭曲缺失对形成社会历史表征的影响。