The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925).
[1] Collective memory has been a topic of interest and research across a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology.
A goal of history broadly is to provide a comprehensive, accurate, and unbiased portrayal of past events.
Consequently, collective memory represents past events as associated with the values, narratives and biases specific to that group.
[11] The concept of collective memory, initially developed by Halbwachs, has been explored and expanded from various angles – a few of these are introduced below.
As another subform of collective memories, Assmann mentions forms detached from the everyday; they can be particular materialized and fixed points as, e.g. texts and monuments.
He theorized that the use of the atomic bomb had forever added to the world's collective memory and would serve in the future as a warning against such devices.
In practice, the construction of a completely collective memory is at best an aspiration of politicians, which is never entirely fulfilled and is always subject to contestations.
Rieff writes in opposition to George Santayana's aphorism "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", pointing out that strong cultural emphasis on certain historical events (often wrongs against the group) can prevent resolution of armed conflicts, especially when the conflict has been previously fought to a draw.
[citation needed] Though traditionally a topic studied in the humanities, collective memory has become an area of interest in psychology.
Weldon and Bellinger (1997) and Basden, Basden, Bryner, and Thomas (1997) provided evidence that retrieval interference underlies collaborative inhibition, as hearing other members' thoughts and discussion about the topic at hand interferes with one's own organization of thoughts and impairs memory.
Studies have found that collective inhibition to sources other than social loafing, as offering a monetary incentive have been evidenced to fail to produce an increase in memory for groups.
[34] The individuals were asked to remember if the clock at Bologna central station in Italy had remained functioning, everyone said no, in fact it was the opposite (Legge, 2018).
[35] Other instances of false memories may occur when remembering something on an object that is not actually there or mistaking how someone looks in a crime scene (Legge, 2018).
Language plays a role with imaginative experiences, because it makes it hard for humans to gather correct information (Jablonka, 2017).
[37] Group settings can also provide opportunities for exposure to erroneous information that may be mistaken to be correct or previously studied.
Selective forgetting has been suggested to be a critical mechanism involved in the formation of collective memories and what details are ultimately included and excluded by group members.
In an early study[45] in 2010 researchers extracted absolute year references from large amounts of news articles collected for queries denoting particular countries.
This allowed to portray so-called memory curves that demonstrate which years are particularly strongly remembered in the context of different countries (commonly, exponential shape of memory curves with occasional peaks that relate to commemorating important past events) and how the attention to more distant years declines in news.