''Remembering'' World War II and willingness to fight : sociocultural factors in the social representation of historical warfare across 22 societies

Students from 22 nations answered a survey on the most important events in world history. At the national level, free recalling and a positive evaluation of World War II (WWII) were associated with World Values Survey willingness to fight for the country in a war and being a victorious nation. Willingness to fight, a more benign evaluation of WWII, and recall of WWII were associ- ated with nation-level scores on power distance and low postmaterialism, suggesting that values stressing obedience and competition between nations are associated with support for collective violence, whereas values of expressive individualism are negatively related. Internal political vio- lence was unrelated to willingness to fight, excluding direct learning as an explanation of legit- imization of violence. Recall of wars in general (operationalized by WWI recall) was also unrelated to willingness to fight. Results replicate and extend Archer and Gartner’s classic study showing the legitimization of violence by war to the domain of collective remembering

From Gist of a Wink to Structural Equivalence of Meaning: Towards a Cross-Cultural Psychology of the Collective Remembering of World History

Gibson and Noret’s (2010 [this issue]) critique of Paez et al.’s (2008) article on “remembering” World War II and willingness to fight applies social constructionist epistemologies based on hermeneutics to large-scale cross-cultural research. In criticizing our operationalization of historical experience, they privilege micro-analysis of discursive features that cannot be applied equally to different cultures; with regards to remembering, they identify the context-specific evocation of a particular aspect of collective remembering with collective memory in general. Their criticism of the wording of the central question on willingness to fight for one’s country is misplaced because this item comes from country-level data from the World Values Survey. Our work, involving 3,322 participants from 22 societies with at least 14 different majority languages, provides analysis of a general phenomenon and cannot be expected to incorporate micro-analysis of local discursive features. Cross-cultural psychology has advanced into a position of international prominence by using quantitative measures to construct nomological or associational networks that create complementary (and alternative) conceptions of meaning to the “thick descriptions” of ethnography favored by cultural anthropology. A division of labor with respect to these fields and across projects is recommended.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Representing World History in the 21st Century: The Impact of 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Nation-State on Dynamics of Collective Remembering

Following open-ended methodology used in an earlier research by Liu et al., social representations of world history were assessed among university student samples in 12 countries: China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, East Timor, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Spain, and Portugal. Findings confirmed that across cultures, transcending boundaries of political ideology, civilization age, or youthful statehood. (a) World history is represented as a story about politics and warfare, with World War II the most important event in history and Hitler its most influential individual. (b) Recency effects are pervasive in young adults' collective remembering, with events and figures from the past 100 years accounting for 72% and 78% of nominations on average. (c) Representations were primarily Eurocentric, with events and figures in Western societies accounting for 40% of nominations overall, but this is tempered by nationalism, especially in the prevalence of local heroes instrumental to the founding of the current state. The representational hegemony of the victorious Western powers of World War II is being challenged by negative evaluations of the American presidency following 9/11 (September 9) and the Iraq War, with George Bush Jr. perceived as more negative than Hitler in four out of six samples where they were both nominated as important. Results are interpreted within a theoretical framework of history and identity, where collective remembering of the past is dynamically interlinked to political issues of the present.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio