William Hirst

• Ph.D.
• Professor at New School

If retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is to play a role in the formation of collective memories, it should be long lasting. Although several studies have found that RIF is short-lived, there is other evidence to suggest that repeated selective practice schedules with a temporal gap between each practice trial may increase the durability of RIF. We...

How do groups remember their shared past? Are there individual differences within a group? How easy is it to change collective memories? The present article addresses these questions by focusing on differences within national subgroups, exploring how national collective memories might differ for Black and White Americans, how individual differences...

Do collective crises have an impact on the characteristics of mental time travel for individuals and collectives? The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique context to address this question due to the intersection it created between the personal and the collective domains. In two studies (N = 273), we examined the valence and perceived agency involved...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Memory covers the science of human memory, its application to clinical disorders, and its broader implications for learning and memory in real-world contexts. Written by field leaders, the handbook integrates behavioral, neural, and computational evidence with current theories of how humans learn and remember. Following...

When recalling autobiographical events, people not only retrieve event details but also the feelings they experienced. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of past feelings associated with two consequential and negatively valenced events, i.e. the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and the COVID-19 pandemic (N...

General Audience Summary Citizens of a country often have a shared representation of their nation’s past. These collective, or national, memories can often differ from one nation to another and across generations. Moreover, they often involve wars. To date, most studies of the national memories of wars have focused on recent, global wars, such as W...

Through their selective rehearsal, Central Speakers can reshape collective memory in a group of listeners, both by increasing accessibility for mentioned items (shared practice effects) and decreasing relative accessibility for related but unmentioned items (socially shared retrieval induced forgetting, i.e. SSRIF). Subsequent networked communicati...

Despite considerable cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating that emotions can influence the encoding and consolidation of memory, research has failed to demonstrate a relationship between self-reported ratings of emotions collected soon after a traumatic event and memory for the event over time. This secondary analysis of data from a multisi...

The study of collective memory from a psychological perspective is still a burgeoning field, but it nevertheless has made significant advances towards the understanding of how communities build a representation of their shared past. The extant literature is discussed in terms of top down approaches that focus on the representations of historical ev...

General Audience Summary People will often remember the circumstances in which they learned of a public, emotionally charged event. Often referred to as flashbulb memories (FBMs), they are of intense interest to the general public, as well as the psychological community, with commentators often noting that an event is such that people will never fo...

This study explores the topics of flashbulb memory, collective identity, future thinking, and shared representations for a public event. We assessed the memories of the Capitol Riots, which happened in Washington DC, on 6 January 2021. Seventy Belgian and seventy-nine American citizens participated in an online study, in which they freely recalled...

Comments on the original article by Liu and Szpunar (see record 2023-29014-001). As reviewed in Liu and Szpunar, psychologists have recently explored the close connection between remembering the past and imagining the future. In the last few years, they have expanded their interest beyond personal “mental time travel, MTT” (Schacter et al., 2017; S...

When recalling autobiographical events, people retrieve not only the event details, but also the feelings they experienced. Past work with different measures of memories for feelings remain inconclusive, suggesting that people are either highly consistent or inconsistent with remembering feelings. The current study examined whether people are able...

Despite considerable cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating that emotions can influence the encoding and consolidation of memory, research has failed to demonstrate a relationship between self-reported ratings of emotions collected soon after a traumatic event and memory for the event over time. This secondary analysis of data from a multi-s...

The two authors – one from literary and cultural studies, the other a cognitive psychologist – explore how the interdisciplinary perspective of Memory Studies can broaden and enrich current research efforts on flashbulb memories (FBMs). FBMs are memories of the circumstances in which one learned of a public emotionally charged event, such as 9/11 ....

In this chapter, we will provide a review on the emerging psychological literature on collective mental time travel (MTT). Our review will focus on the cognitive aspects of remembering the collective past and imagining the collective future. We will explore factors such as specificity, phenomenal characteristics, content, and valence. We will also...

Reviews psychological approaches to collective memory

General Audience Summary Psychologists have defined collective memories as widely shared memories that bear on a group’s identity (Hirst et al., 2018) and consider these memories to be distinct from history. We evaluated this distinction by examining the identity relevance and historical importance placed on representations of public events. We con...

We examined whether and how conversational roles shape the extent to which details and recollections surrounding World War II (WWII) emerge in family conversations. Each family was tasked with collaboratively discussing four topics surrounding WWII specific to Belgium. We then conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The former compare...

A flashbulb memory is a highly detailed and vivid autobiographical memory for the circumstances in which one first learned of a surprising, consequential and emotionally arousing event. How retelling of different features of a flashbulb memory changes over time is not totally understood. Moreover, little is known about how the emotional feeling exp...

Recent work on intergenerational memory has revealed a positive association between family of origin knowledge and wellbeing in adolescents. However, little is known about the generalizability of these data, as significantly less attention has focused on autobiographical memory sharing and wellbeing in historically marginalized communities. Given t...

Collective memory of historical events can be transmitted across generations not only through cultural memory but also through communicative memory, that is, transmitted by people who have lived through these particular times. Yet, few studies have examined the temporal horizon of a particular type of communicative memory: family historical memorie...

The study of collective memory from a psychological perspective is still a burgeoning field, but it nevertheless has made significant advances towards the understanding of how communities build a representation of their shared past. The extant literature is discussed in terms of top down approaches that focus on the representations of historical ev...

Two studies examined how memories are formed around championship sporting events, which we classify as media events. The first study employed a test-retest methodology to assess how fans of a sport recall a championship sporting event. The second study examined how fans of specific sports teams recalled two championship sporting events in which the...

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 forgetti...

LTAM is a web-based platform designed for the longitudinal study of autobiographical memory. The platform allows users to record memories daily as well as to conduct automated tests of recall. Memories are rated on a variety of characteristics both when they are recorded and again when they are recalled. Over the past three months, users have been...

The study of memory and remembering has traditionally either stripped meaning away from acts of remembering to reveal the “raw material of memory” or explored how meaning guides the reconstruction of the past. In reflecting on the contributions to this topic, there appears to be an emerging “third‐way,” which holds that there is an inextricable rel...

General Audience Summary If you could choose one memory from your life to bring with you into death, which memory would you select? Why that particular memory? Research exploring memories selected in response to a wide variety of cues tends to find that people remember events from late adolescence into early adulthood, a phenomenon known as the rem...

A primary interest in the psychological study of collective memory concerns the sociocognitive processes by which Central Speakers-politicians, journalists, and other public voices-may reshape the memory of groups of listeners. In 2 experiments, we examine how (a) Central Speakers may induce shared practice effects and socially shared retrieval-ind...

The present research introduces perceived agency as an important factor in mental time travel. Across three studies, participants were asked to remember and imagine personal events that involved/will involve themselves in the past and future. Later they evaluated these events in terms of valence and perceived agency. Results revealed a tendency to...

The jury is a defining component of the American criminal justice system, and the courts largely assume that the collaborative nature of jury deliberations will enhance jurors’ memory for important trial information. However, research suggests that this kind of collaboration, although sometimes improving memory, can also lead to incomplete and inac...

The present studies examine how people recall history. Sometimes, certain national histories are well known and sometimes they are not. We propose that, under certain circumstances, culturally distinctive representations of typical national histories can be used to guide recall, particularly in cases where the history is not well known. We focus on...

Social scientists have studied collective memory for almost a century, but psychological analyses have only recently emerged. Although no singular approach to the psychological study of collective memory exists, research has largely: (i) explored the social representations of history, including generational differences; (ii) probed for the underlyi...

Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common in...

Studies on collective memory have recently addressed the distinction between cultural and communicative memory as a way to understand how the source of a memory affects its structure or form. When a groups’ memory is mediated by memorials, documentaries or any other cultural artifacts, collective memory is shaped by cultural memory. When it is base...

Remembering is dynamically entangled in conversations. The communicative function of episodic memory can be epistemic, as suggested by Mahr and Csibra. However, remembering can have genuinely social functions, specifically, the creation or consolidation of interpersonal relationships. Autonoesis, a distinct feature of episodic memory, is more likel...

Our aim here is to delineate the connection between selective remembering and selective forgetting as it applies to lay historians listening to selective recountings of history. How does what a speaker remembers about a nation's past shape what is forgotten about the nation's past for the listener? To address this question, we will discuss psycholo...

Flashbulb memories related to negative arousing event inform on traumatic memory processes, as well as trauma related disorder such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. These memories are not immutable photographs of the past experience, and there is now a general consensus about their retention over time. However, little is known on whether contextu...

We connect two areas of research: psychological research on mental time travel as a way of understanding memory and the interdisciplinary work on collective memory. For individuals, remembering the personal past and imagining the personal future are closely related. We explore whether the link can extend to the collective realm. We review two recen...

In the aftermath of a national tragedy, important decisions are predicated on judgments of the emotional significance of the tragedy in the present and future. Research in affective forecasting has largely focused on ways in which people fail to make accurate predictions about the nature and duration of feelings experienced in the aftermath of an e...

We review and analyze the key theories, debates, findings, and omissions of the existing literature on flashbulb memories (FBMs), including what factors affect their formation, retention, and degree of confidence. We argue that FBMs do not require special memory mechanisms and are best characterized as involving both forgetting and mnemonic distort...

Recent public testimony concerning sexual abuse on the part of celebrities raises the question of what happens to memories when they enter the public domain. The present paper reviews research on the effects of communication on memory and examines how the context of this communication affects its influence on memory, both in the short and long term...

Although memories about a nation’s past usually are semantic in nature, a distinction needs to be made between lived and distant semantic collective memories. The former refers to memories of community- relevant events occurring during the lifetime of the rememberer, whereas the latter to memories of distant events. Does the content of lived and di...

No one doubts that memories are shaped by the social context in which they are formed or later remembered. In this essay we focus on how the social context of remembering and memorizing with others shapes the way both the speaker and listener remember the past, what we refer to as collaborative remembering. In addressing the mnemonic consequences o...

In a conversation, speakers and listeners will often influence each other's memories, and in doing so, promote the formation of a shared, or collective, memory. One means by which a mnemonic consensus emerges is through socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SSRIF). When listeners attend to the speakers' selective retrieval of previously enc...

Within a week of the attack of September 11, 2001, a consortium of researchers from across the United States distributed a survey asking about the circumstances in which respondents learned of the attack (their flashbulb memories) and the facts about the attack itself (their event memories). Follow-up surveys were distributed 11, 25, and 119 months...

We examined whether and how memories and knowledge of World War II (WWII) transmit across generations. We recruited five French-speaking Belgian families and interviewed one member from each generation. As the oldest generation had to be alive during WWII, their interviews constituted “memories” while the interviews of the middle and youngest gener...

Research on the social influences on remembering has focused on how people influence one another's memory through direct conversation. This project examined indirect influence, that is, the influence of those to whom one may be connected through a social network. We extend Christakis and Fowler's (2009) discovery that factors may propagate across s...

Individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) tend to retrieve autobiographical memories with less episodic specificity, referred to as overgeneralised autobiographical memory. In line with evidence that autobiographical memory overlaps with one's capacity to imagine the future, recent work has also shown that individuals with PTSD also im...

How communities forge collective memories has been a topic of long-standing interest among social scientists and, more recently, psychologists. However, researchers have typically focused on how what is overtly remembered becomes collectively remembered. Recently, though, Stone and colleagues have delineated different types of silence and their inf...

A burgeoning literature has established that exposure to atrocities committed by in-group members triggers moral-disengagement strategies. There is little research, however, on how such moral disengagement affects the degree to which conversations shape people's memories of the atrocities and subsequent justifications for those atrocities. We built...

Speakers reshape listeners' memories through at least two discrete means: (1) social contagion and (2) socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SSRIF). Three experiments explored how social relationships between speaker and listener moderate these conversational effects, focusing specifically on two speaker characteristics, expertise and trust...

Although remembering often occurs with conversations, the effects of its pragmatics on memory are rarely examined. We studied the effect of two pragmatic factors: (1) the presence of disagreeing and (2) the level of participation in the disagreement. In the present study, each participant read a slightly different version of four stories, thereby a...

People build their sense of self, in part, through their memories of their personal past. What is striking about these personal memories is that, in many instances, they are inaccurate, yet confidently held. Most researchers assume that confidence ratings are based, in large part, on the memory's mnemonic features. That is, the more vivid or detail...

Medical decisions will often entail a broad search for relevant information. No sources alone may offer a complete picture, and many may be selective in their presentation. This selectivity may induce forgetting for previously learned material, thereby adversely affecting medical decision-making. In the study phase of two experiments, participants...

Empirical research has increasingly turned its attention to distributed cognition. Acts of remembering are embedded in a social, interactional context; cognitive labor is divided between a rememberer and external sources. The present article examines the benefits and costs associated with distributed, collaborative, conversational remembering. Furt...

We examined and compared the predictors of autobiographical memory (AM) consistency and event memory accuracy across two publicly documented yet disparate public events: the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States on January 20th 2009, and the emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549, off the coast of Manhattan, o...

People often talk to others about their personal past. These discussions are inherently selective. Selective retrieval of memories in the course of a conversation may induce forgetting of unmentioned but related memories for both speakers and listeners (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). Cuc et al. (2007) defined the forgetting on the part of the speaker...

The field of autobiographical memory has made dramatic advances since the first collection of papers in the area was published in 1986. Now, over 25 years on, this book reviews and integrates the many theories, perspectives, and approaches that have evolved over the last decades. A truly eminent collection of editors and contributors appraise the b...

If anything has been learned about memory, it is that it is fragile and error prone (Schacter, 2001; Loftus, 2005). Far from being a verbatim record of the past, memory is well understood as a reconstructive process replete with distortions, and at times, gross inaccuracies. Although often associated with negative consequences (Wells and Olson, 200...

This study builds on the assumption that large-scale social phenomena emerge out of the interaction between individual cognitive mechanisms and social dynamics. Within this framework, we empirically investigated the propagation of memory effects (retrieval induced forgetting and practice effects) through sequences of social interactions. We found t...

Silence about the past permeates acts of remembering, with marked mnemonic consequences. Mnemonic silence-the absence of expressing a memory-is public in nature and is embedded within communicative acts, such as conversations. As such, silence has the potential to affect both speakers-the source of the silence-and listeners-those attending to the s...

Memory for related but unpracticed aspects of an event can be impaired by selectively retrieving parts of the same event. This occurs when selective retrieval [within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WI-RIF)] is undertaken by individuals and has been extended to social contexts—RIF can be produced in listeners [socially shared retrieval-ind...

The formation and maintenance of a collective memory depends the psychological efficacy of societal practices. This efficacy builds on the strengths and weakness of human memory. We view the articles in this special issue through a psychological lens in order to explore how the efficacy of the actions of the distinctive linguistic communities in Be...

Background: Studies show that individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) tend to recall autobiographical memories with decreased episodic specificity. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the mechanisms involved in recalling autobiographical memories overlap considerably with those involved in imagining the future. Although...

Although a burgeoning literature has shown that practice effects and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting can reshape the memories of speakers and listeners involved in a conversation, it has generally failed to examine whether such effects can propagate through a sequence of conversational interactions. This lacuna is unfortunate, since se...

In the aftermath of a traumatic event, individuals may engage in a series of comparisons in which they appraise their current functioning in relation to how they functioned prior to the traumatic event, as well as how they anticipate functioning in the future. In addition, trauma-exposed individuals may also appraise their functioning in relation t...

People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychological research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (transactive memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative...

Research has demonstrated that the extent to which an individual integrates a traumatic event into their identity ("trauma centrality") positively correlates with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. No research to date has examined trauma centrality in individuals exposed to combat stress. This study investigated trauma centralit...

Memory often serves as the foundation or impetus for our opinions and actions. This holds at both the individual and group levels. On the individual level, Pillemer and colleagues have documented, in a series of book chapters and papers, the directive function of autobiographical memory (for a review, see Pillemer 2003). Pillemer gives the example...

We examined whether the New School Psychology Bulletin (NSPB), a peer reviewed journal operated by graduate students, was perceived as relevant and effective among individuals pursuing clinical, nonclinical (research and academic), and combined clinical and nonclinical careers. Individuals (N = 155) were surveyed for career goals, current research...

A large body of literature on "within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting" (WI-RIF; Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994) shows that repeatedly retrieving some items, while not retrieving other related items, facilitates later recall of the practised items, but inhibits later recall of the non-practised related items. This robust effect has recently...

People often form collective memories by sharing their memories with others. Warnings about the reliability of one conversational participant can limit the extent to which conversations or other forms of postevent information can influence subsequent memory. Although this attenuation is consistently found for prewarnings, there are substantial reas...

The study of collective memory has burgeoned in the last 20years, so much so that one can even detect a growing resistance to what some view as the imperialistic march of memory studies across the social sciences (e.g., Berliner 2005; Fabian 1999). Yet despite its clear advance, one area that has remained on the sidelines is psychology. On the one...

A speaker's selective recounting of memories shared with a listener will induce both the speaker and the listener to forget unmentioned, related material more than unmentioned, unrelated material. We extended this finding of within-individual and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting to well-rehearsed, emotionally intense memories that are s...

More than 3,000 individuals from 7 U.S. cities reported on their memories of learning of the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well as details about the attack, 1 week, 11 months, and/or 35 months after the assault. Some studies of flashbulb memories examining long-term retention show slowing in the rate of forgetting after a year, whereas othe...

Only in recent years have efforts to illuminate antecedents, processes, and consequences of social influence on memory intensified. This special issue presents current research that makes further progress in this endeavor, promoting a more integrated understanding of the social dimensions of memory. In the following we briefly trace the development...

Are individuals more likely to serve as a vehicle for social contagion because they are perceived as experts or because they talk a lot? This study parses the contribution of expertise and narratorship by asking groups of three or four individuals to study variants of a curriculum vitae (CV) and then to recall the CV individually, as a group, and o...

This article discusses the place of psychology within the now voluminous social scientific literature on collective memory. Many social scientists locate collective memories in the social resources that shape them. For scholars adopting this perspective, collective memories are viewed as transcending individuals; that is, as being "in the world". O...