Abstract
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 influence on how individuals and groups remember the past, what they termed, mnemonic silence. Here we focus on the importance of relatedness in understanding the mnemonic consequences of public silence. We begin by describing two common means of investigating collective memories: the social construction approach and the psychological approach. We subsequently discuss in detail a psychological paradigm, retrieval-induced forgetting, and demonstrate how this initially individual memory paradigm can and has been extended to social contexts in the form of public silence and may provide insights into larger sociological phenomenon, in our case, collective memories. We conclude by discussing avenues of future research and the benefits of including a psychological perspective in the field of collective memory.
Keywords
Public silence is silence experienced by what Zerubavel (2004) has called a mnemonic community. This community can be small—a couple or even two unrelated individuals who experience similar events—or large—such as a nation or a religious group. What is important for us is that the silence is shared by this community. Public silence is a common characteristic of a community’s discourse, from the failure of political leaders to state all that they know about a national crisis, to an embarrassing hesitancy when one person speaks to another about a socially taboo topic. It is particularly endemic where oppressed minorities are concerned and where social taboos and strictures make voicing concerns difficult, if not illegal.
Despite the ubiquity of public silence, psychologists interested in collective memories have only recently begun to address the mnemonic consequences of silence within social contexts such as conversations and political discourse (but see Stone et al., 2012). We address this lacuna in the present article by exploring whether remaining silent about aspects related or unrelated to what is discussed in the context of a social interaction has important implications for the forging and shaping of collective memories. What differentiates the present effort at discussing silence from others (e.g. Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger, 2010; Zerubavel, 2004, but see Stone et al., 2012) is that we are interested here in a psychological approach to public silence and collective memory. Specifically, we want to examine how retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), an individual/psychological memory phenomenon, might bear on the decidedly social issue of public silence and, in turn, collective memories. In examining silence through the lens of RIF, we will argue and demonstrate that not all silence is mnemonically equal: remaining silent about aspects of the past that are related to what is discussed will more likely be forgotten than if the discussion never occurred in the first place.
Two points need to be made about our use of the term collective memory. First, as we use the term, collective memories are shared, long-lasting memories that bear on a community’s identity (Hirst and Manier, 2008). Spaniards might share a memory of the value of pi, but this memory would probably not be classified as a Spanish collective memory. It does not bear on what makes Spaniards who they are. Alternatively, the memory Spaniards share of the 2004 bombing of Madrid is appropriately classified as a Spanish collective memory because, in addition to being shared, it no doubt plays a role in shaping Spanish identity.
Second, defining collective memory in terms of shared memories embraces not just what is remembered, but also what is not remembered. If collective memories are to serve as a foundation on which to build a collective identity, then what is not remembered is as critical to forming this identity as what is remembered. Spaniards are Spaniards not only because they collectively remember the bombing of Madrid, but also because they collectively forget, or at least find relatively inaccessible, their treatment of indigenous peoples in Latin America during their colonial period (Maybury-Lewis, 2006; see also Cole, 2001). Our attention here will focus on the role mnemonic silence serves in promoting collective forgetting in the context of social interactions.
In writing about collective forgetting, we are not necessarily implying that a memory is erased. Rather, we only mean that it is inaccessible at the time the remembering takes place (Habib and Nyberg, 2007; Tulving and Pearlstone, 1966). To be precise, then, the question occupying this article is “How does whether a public silence is related or unrelated to what is discussed lead to a memory becoming inaccessible not just for one member of a community but also for the community as a whole?”
Psychological or social construction approaches to collective memory research
As we have indicated, our approach here is psychological. Yet research on the formation of collective memory tends to adopt what we will refer to as a social construction approach (see Hirst and Manier, 2008 for similar distinction). The social construction approach examines the efforts society makes to construct and maintain collective memories (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994; Kansteiner, 2002; Olick, 1999). In doing so, it analyzes both the character and the origin of cultural and social practices and artifacts. Be they monuments, memorials, commemorations, educational dictates, or social taboos, each practice or artifact facilitates or constrains what about the past will or will not be conveyed and rehearsed by a community. Once established and maintained, the assumption is that their effect on society is relatively straightforward (Nora, 1996; Sturken, 1997, but see Schwartz, 1982). If one builds a memorial, then, under many circumstances, the dead may be remembered, even with the passage of time. If one fails to build the memorial, then this public silence may allow the dead to be forgotten over time.
Although it is important to understand how society constructs and maintains mnemonic practices and artifacts, it is only part of the collective memory story (Hirst and Echterhoff, 2008; Hirst and Manier, 2008; Roediger et al., 2009). A psychological approach constitutes a necessary additional element. This approach begins with the belief that the relation between practices and artifacts and their effect on memory is not always transparent and that scholars must specify in detail the psychological mechanisms underlying this relation. Engagement with mnemonic practices or artifacts is not sufficient for the formation of a collective memory. Despite repeated reporting about the role the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam played in the Iraq War, even some United States senators could not identify which sect was associated with Iran and which were followers of Saddam Hussein (Cooper, 2008). A psychological approach would seek to understand why the constant public discussion about Islamic sects did not contribute to the American collective memory of Islam. In a similar vein, a psychological approach would also try to understand why public silence sometimes, but not at other times, decreases the accessibility of memories. Turkish laws restrict public discourse about the Armenian march and resulting genocide, but Armenians living in Turkey still remember the march (Miller and Miller, 1993). A psychological approach would probe why and how this legally enforced public silence fails to promote forgetting in certain segments of society.
Proponents of a psychological approach to collective memory often focus on the cognitive mechanisms governing individual memory (Harris et al., 2008; Hirst and Manier, 2008; Roediger et al., 2009; Weldon, 2001). Thus, relevant to this article, psychologists would first understand how silence elicits forgetting on the part of one community member, then in small groups, such as dyads, and then finally text and/or generalize to the community as a whole. To be sure, public silence often arises because of institutional and cultural practices. Understanding how and why these practices develop and are maintained is not only a necessary component of any exploration of collective memory, but also outside the traditional boundaries set for psychology (Crane, 1997; Kroeber, 1923). Appreciating whether and how these public silences can induce or allow forgetting across a whole community is a psychological chore.
An emphasis on conversations
Much of the social science literature on collective memory focuses on memorials and commemorations, clearly products of social efforts to shape the memory of a community. We depart from this trend and focus here on the acts of remembering within the context of conversations and discourse. Conversations and discourse do not have the materiality and certainly not the permanence of memorials or even commemorations. Assmann (1995) underscored this point when he averred that the temporal horizon of communicative memory was short—about 100 years—whereas the temporal horizon of cultural memory is long—often lasting for many centuries. We concentrate here on conversations and discourse for several reasons. First, as will become clear as the article unfolds, there is substantial psychological literature that relates conversations and memory, making it a good phenomenon for studying a psychological approach to collective memory (see Hirst and Echterhoff, 2008 for further exploration of this point). Second, people often talk to others about past events of consequence to their community (Ibrahim et al., 2008; Mehl and Pennebaker, 2003; Miller, 1994). Conversations can often serve as a vehicle through which memories spread across a community. For instance, Harber and Cohen (2005) took their psychology class of 33 students to the morgue and found that 881 other people knew about the trip within 3 days, a multiplier of 26.7.
Third, and importantly, conversations are often the main, perhaps, only route by which a memory can spread (Fentress and Wickham, 1992; Wertsch, 2002). Lithuanians of Lithuanian descent tell a quite different history of their country than what they were taught in the Russian-written history books they used in school (Schuman et al., 1994; Wertsch, 2002). Conversations may play a critical role in promoting these informal collective memories, what scholars have referred to as unofficial, vernacular, subaltern, or counter-memories (Blight, 2001; Bodnar, 1992; Foucault, 1997; Stoler and Strassler, 2000). Public silence may affect the content of not just official memories but also vernacular ones.
Fourth, conversations provide a means to discuss pre-established memories already shared by the discussants, as well as new information. For example, pre-established memories about the more memorable moments of their college years often figure in the conversations of recently reunited old college friends. The purposes of these discussions are not aimed at simply gaining new knowledge, though that sometimes occurs. Rather, they can build and strengthen social bonds (see, for example, Bluck et al., 2005; Fivush et al., 1996). In doing so, the conversations may, intentionally or unintentionally, reshape shared memories.
Finally, to emphasize the point once more, inasmuch as conversations can be characterized by what is not said as much as by what is said, they may be the ideal context for studying the effect of public silence on collective forgetting (Dudukovic et al., 2004; Marsh, 2007; Marsh and Tversky, 2004; Tversky and Marsh, 2000; Weldon, 2001). They may not only provide a desirable context for observing silences, but, despite the fact that they usually occur only between a few individuals, we suspect, notwithstanding larger sociological influences (i.e. media, culture), that they might also serve as a stepping-stone for understanding how public silence can promote forgetting in cases of large-scale public discourse, for example, public speeches.
Before proceeding with our discussion of public silence within the context of conversations and collective forgetting, we need to clarify our use of the terms speaker and listener. In a conversation, who is the speaker and who are the listeners will change from conversational turn to conversational turn. We will be referring to the speaker and listeners not turn by turn, but across a conversation. Consequently, we will not be assigning these roles to specific conversational participants. Rather, the speakers’ performance will be the performance of all the conversational participants when they served that role. The same holds for listeners.
Elsewhere, researchers have described how what speakers say shapes subsequent remembering for both the speaker and listeners(s) (see, for example, Cuc et al., 2006). Here, however, we want to examine how RIF, an individual/psychological memory phenomenon, might bear on the decidedly social issue of public silence and, in turn, collective memories. This is particularly critical as social scientists often assume the individualized nature of psychological studies and paradigms prevent any explanatory power at the societal level. We challenge this assumption and argue that by applying the RIF paradigm to public silences within the context of conversations/discourse, psychologists can provide critical insights into how collective memories are both forged and shaped through collective forgetting.
Silence, relatedness, and induced forgetting
Individuals in a conversation may remain silent about a past event by not talking about it at all or by selectively recounting it—saying some things, while not saying others. Studies of RIF capture these two types of silence and suggest that they have different implications for collective forgetting. In the standard laboratory-based experiment studying RIF (Anderson et al., 1994; see also Kuhl et al., 2007; see Table 1), participants study and learn category–exemplar pairs (e.g. fruit–apple, fruit–orange, vegetable–broccoli, vegetable–pea). They then receive retrieval practice on half of the items from half of the categories. The experimenter controls what is practiced by providing the participant with the category name and the first two letters of one of the studied exemplars (e.g. fruit–ap____). The participant must recall the exemplar. A final recall test follows, with participants recalling the originally studied exemplars after being given the category labels.
Design of retrieval-induced forgetting experiments.
The selective retrieval in the practice phase of the experiment captures, in a stripped-down way, the two forms of silence we referred to: failing to talk about a topic at all or failing to talk about aspects of the topic. Specifically, the experimental design creates three types of memories: Rp+, practiced memories (e.g. fruit–apple); Rp−, unpracticed memories related to the practiced memories (e.g. fruit–orange), and Nrp, unpracticed memories unrelated to any practiced memory (e.g. all the vegetables). If we think of a category as a “topic of discussion,” Rp− items are, in essence, silent aspects of a selectively remembered topic, whereas Nrp items are classified in this way because the participants have avoided talking about the topic altogether. That is, the practice phase captures both complete silence (the Nrp items, e.g. all the vegetable terms) and selective silence (the Rp− items, for example, the omission of fruit–orange).
Using this paradigm, psychologists have accrued a large body of evidence that, on a final recall test, Rp+ items are remembered better than Nrp items, which in turn are remembered better than Rp− items (in short, Rp+ > Nrp > Rp−, Anderson et al., 1994; Barnier et al., 2004; Ciranni and Shimamura, 1999; Hicks and Starns, 2004; Saunders and MacLeod, 2002; Shaw et al., 1995; see Figure 1). That is, the rate of forgetting depends on the relation between what is not said and what is said: forgetting is worse when the two are related. Although various explanations for such forgetting have been proposed (see, e.g. Dodd et al., 2006), an inhibitory model through response competition is the most generally accepted explanation (see Anderson, 2003; Veling and Van Knippenberg, 2004; Wimber et al., 2008).
The standard retrieval-induced forgetting recall pattern.
Critically, RIF can be found in situations that approximate everyday remembering, for instance, when the selective remembering and selective silence is within the context of a free-flowing conversation. Participants are asked to study stories that have an episode–event structure that parallels the category–exemplar structure of the material found in the study by Anderson et al. (1994). For example, the story could contain an episode Going to Coney Island, which, in turn, would consist of a sequence of events, Rode on roller coaster, Ate a hot dog, Went swimming. Participants then recount the story to each other. As we have noted, the recounting is inevitably selective, producing Rp+, Rp−, and Nrp memories. A final memory test assesses the consequences of this selective practice. Experiments along these lines have repeatedly found RIF (Cuc et al., 2007; Stone et al., 2010).
Perhaps even more interesting for a discussion of collective memory, RIF is found not only when participants serve the role of speaker in a conversation, such as in the experiment just discussed, but also when they serve the role of listener (Cuc et al., 2007). The former is referred to as within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WI-RIF) and the latter as socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF). The presence of SS-RIF suggests that the effect of silence applies not just to speakers but also to listeners in a conversation. Hirst and colleagues have argued that SS-RIF occurs because listeners concurrently, albeit covertly, retrieve with the speaker (see Hirst and Echterhoff, 2012). With this concurrent, covert retrieval, the listener will be in a situation similar to that of the speaker. SS-RIF differs from the RIF observed in a speaker or an individual remembering on his own in that SS-RIF is optional. Listeners do not have to concurrently retrieve along with a speaker; such concurrent retrieval on the part of the listener will depend upon the listener’s conversational/listening goals (see Cuc et al., 2007) or who they are listening to (see Barber and Mather, 2012; Coman and Hirst, 2012; Stone et al., in preparation). Such mutual forgetting, however, has been found for a number of different stimuli including autobiographical memories (Stone et al., 2013), traumatic material (Brown et al., 2012), flashbulb memories (Coman et al., 2009), and political issues (Coman and Hirst, 2012).
Collective forgetting: small groups
SS-RIF also offers a path by which public silence may produce similar forgetting across a group. Both listeners and speakers not only experience what is said and not said in the conversation, but this shared conversational remembering and silence should produce similar effects on the memory of all conversational participants or, in other words, collective forgetting.
To examine whether such collective forgetting occurs, Stone et al. (2010) conducted a study where groups of two participants carefully studied an eight-episode story about a tour of a house. After studying this story, participants commenced a free-flowing conversation about the story. Critically, as mentioned above, participants did not recall everything about the story. They remained silent about some aspects related to what was discussed (Rp−) and other aspects unrelated to what was discussed (Nrp). For example, when discussing the “Kitchen,” the participants may discuss the six-burner stove while not saying anything about the state of the refrigerator (Rp−). However, they may not discuss any details at all about the “Bathroom” (Nrp).
Stone and colleagues found that both what was discussed and left silent in the course of the conversation led to induced forgetting for both the speaker and the listener. More critically, the discussants came to form a shared representation of the past, or a collective memory of the story, which could not be solely explained by what was mentioned in the conversation. Rather, the shared representation was also the result of forgetting arising out of the selective silence. In other words, the collective memory of the story was forged through both collective remembering and collective forgetting.
Such mutual forgetting has also been found for autobiographical memories and for small groups of strangers and intimates. In four experiments, Stone et al. (2013) recruited both strangers and intimate partners. All participants were required to elicit 30 autobiographical memories. However, for the intimate partners, they were required to provide memories they jointly experienced with their partner (e.g. “When he proposed to me on my 25th birthday in front of all my friends and family”). In this sense, intimates elicited pre-established “collective memories.” The strangers merely had to elicit individually relevant autobiographical memories (e.g. “When I was struck by lightning 10 years ago in Kansas”). All strangers were paired with strangers and all intimate partners were paired with their respective partners. After both members of the pairs learned the memories to be used in the experiment, they were provided with as much time as needed to discuss them. Again, these discussions were selective. In a subsequent individual memory test, Stone et al. found not only induced forgetting of autobiographical memories for the strangers, but also induced forgetting of the shared, autobiographical memories for the intimate partners. Thus, conversations, through both what is voiced and left silent, may not only forge collective memories but also reshape pre-established “collective” memories over time by inducing mutual forgetting (see Coman et al., in preparation, for similar results for atrocities committed by in-group members).
Collective forgetting: larger groups
Until now we have focused our discussion on dyadic groups and singular social interactions, but recent research suggests that the pattern of remembering and forgetting as a result of selective voicing and silence within the context of a conversation may also propagate across a group or community through a series of social interactions. Coman and Hirst (2012) examined this possibility by experimentally exploring how SS-RIF propagates across a small sequence of social interactions. We want to focus here, however, on situations in which political figures might shape their public’s collective memory through their speeches. Here, if you like, one figure—the politician—has simultaneous dyadic relationships with a large number people, the public. While each listener may engage with speech differently (e.g. as a result of their feelings toward the figure, their political ideology, socio-economic status, etc.), based on the previous SS-RIF work, we should expect induced forgetting, in general, in those listeners who concurrently retrieve along with the political figure as a result of what Connerton (2008) might refer to as “humiliated silence” as it is “covert, unmarked and unacknowledged” (p. 67). We turn to political speeches because they are selective, avoiding some topics while providing selective coverage of others. They therefore provide a possible context for induced forgetting. Can a political speech induce forgetting so that unmentioned, but related aspects of a political topic are more likely to be forgotten as a result of listening to the speech than the unmentioned aspects of an unrelated and undiscussed political topic? We recently tested this possibility using, as a case study, Belgium, a country comprising primarily two opposing social groups (French-speakers and Dutch-speakers) (Stone et al., in preparation).
On 17 February 2011, Belgium broke the record (set by Iraq) for the number of days without a government (249 days) (Cendrowicz, 2011). Later that year, Belgium formed a government and Elio Di Rupo became the Prime Minister on the 6 December 2011. Given this historic moment, my colleagues and I took this opportunity to examine whether the mnemonic consequences of a public speech may be partially explained by induced forgetting for those who attended to the speech. Rather than the Prime Minister’s inaugural speech, 1 we decided to focus on the two speeches by the King of Belgium, Albert II. Every year, the King delivers two major speeches: one in December, the other in July. We used the December 2011 speech as a pilot study and the July 2012 speech for the actual study.
To this end, we drafted an online questionnaire that, among other things, asked participants to list six facets of four Belgian-related political issues. The four issues were as follows: the economic concerns of Belgium, the “linguistic” issue (Belgium is trilingual, composed primarily of French- and Dutch-speakers with a small contingent of German-speakers), issues related to Brussels (a bilingual city: French and Dutch) whose relation to the two linguistically (French and Dutch) distinct regions of Belgium is contested), and Belgian history (how to frame the history given the present concerns about the future of Belgium). We disseminated the questionnaires to both French- and Dutch-speaking Belgians both before and after the King’s two public speeches. As we anticipated, and is the norm with all political speeches, the King’s speech was selective. He discussed economic issues and linguistic issues, but did not discuss issues involving Brussels or Belgian history, two topics that have been discussed by the King in the past.
We were interested in whether listening to the King’s speech affected accessibility to information relevant to the four political issues we probed for prior to the speech. Specifically, did respondents have more difficulty arriving at six facets of economic and linguistic issues after listening to the speech than they did before listening to the speech? We divided each item they listed into three categories: Rp+ for items specifically mentioned by the King; Rp−, items relevant to one of the two political issues the King did talk about but failed to mention; Nrp, items relevant to the two issues on our questionnaire, which the King did not talk about. We were interested in comparing the number of Rp− and Nrp items listed before and after the speech. SS-RIF could be said to occur if Nrp > Rp− was evident after the speech, assuming that the two were similar prior to the speech. As evidence that listening to the speech did induce forgetting, we found that Rp− items were recalled less frequently than Nrp items for French-speakers who listened to the speech, but not for French-speakers who failed to listen to the speech. No differences were found between the two samples in the questionnaire given prior to the speech. We failed to find a similar pattern for the Dutch-speakers. Both before and after the speech, regardless of attendance to the speech, Rp− items were statistically equivalent to Nrp items.
We suspect the difference between French- and Dutch-speakers reflects their distinctive social identity and the social identity attributed to the King: The King speaks French at home and his Dutch is less than fluent. The Dutch-speakers may not have closely attended to the speech and consequently failed to concurrently retrieve along with the King. Moreover, the Dutch-speakers who attended to the speech may have been more suspicious and therefore undertook broad search patterns in order to assess the veracity of the King’s words, a retrieval strategy that often leads to facilitation effects, not induced forgetting (see Chan et al., 2006). Our finding that social identity matters is consistent with other SS-RIF results, which show that induced forgetting is more likely to occur when listening to a like-minded individual (Barber and Mather, 2012; Coman and Hirst, 2012). We need, however, to explore this possibility in more detail in future research.
It would appear, then, that public speeches may not only inform, commemorate, and/or reinforce memories of the past but also induce those who attend to forget memories related to the speech, at least if listeners “identify” with the speaker. Thus, President Bush would have been more effective in inducing the American public, his listeners, to forget that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) played a role in the build-up to the Iraq War if he had spoken out about the build-up and avoided any mention of WMDs. Avoiding any discussion of the build-up, in general, would have been a less effective means to induce forgetting. The same lesson could be applied to a wide number of situations in which one person or party wants to shape what others collectively remember and collectively forget.
In sum, then, silence can promote collective forgetting, but does so in a way that is sensitive both to what is and what is not said. Silence does not merely permit decay. Rather, in conjunction with what is said, silence impairs some memories over others. The result is a gradient of forgetting. Moreover, because remembering—or not remembering—occurs within social contexts, silence produces both individual and collective forgetting. The gradient of forgetting is shared across the participants in a social interaction, be it conversations, text, or public speeches. These social interactions not only shape what the group will remember, it structures what they will forget.
General discussion
In this article, we have demonstrated and emphasized the importance of relatedness in understanding the role public silence plays in promoting collective forgetting. Moreover, and this is perhaps the critical point of our article, the consequences of public silence on subsequent forgetting—both individual and collective—cannot be appreciated fully without considering the context in which the silence occurs: if the public silence is related to what is mentioned, the resultant individual and collective forgetting would be greater than if the public silence was unrelated to what is mentioned. Critically, we have demonstrated how a simple psychological paradigm can be extended to social settings and provide counter-intuitive insights into the formation of collective memories, an area of study generally considered too far afield for psychologists to have anything meaningful to contribute to the discussion.
As to objections to the kind of psychological approach we have argued for, we may have articulated how silence in a conversation emerges and how silence affects subsequent remembering and forgetting. We have even provided an account of how the unintuitive pattern of effects on subsequent remembering and forgetting may provide a means of understanding why emergent collective memories take the form that they do after a conversation/social interaction. However, the situations we have discussed are, at best, circumscribed in at least three ways.
First, we limited ourselves to conversations as the social resource promoting the formation of collective memory. This maneuver may be legitimate, however, inasmuch as conversations do play this role in everyday life. Nevertheless, the same psychological approach advanced here might bear tellingly on other mnemonic/social resources, such as memorial, commemorations, and the media. Each of these involves some form of communication, though, in many cases, the source of the communication is unknown (Assmann, 1995; Irwin-Zarecka, 1994; Kansteiner, 2002; Mitchell, 2003; Olick, 1999; Olick and Robbins, 1998; Osborne, 2001; Schwartz, 1991). We therefore might expect results similar to those we observed within the context of conversations. What happens to the information not depicted in a monument? What happens to Americans’ appreciation of Lincoln as a common man when they view the Lincoln Memorial? The answers to these questions might or might not be related to the induced forgetting we find as a consequence of conversations, but whatever the answer, we will no doubt turn to psychological mechanisms to help provide an answer, focusing on psychological mechanisms and the mediating interactions that underlie the encounter with the Memorial.
Second, we too narrowly focus on the effects of speaker on speaker and speaker on listener. There may be more to the group interaction than just the interaction between speaker and listener. Even so, incorporating psychological principles of RIF (among others, such as rehearsal, social contagion, and retrieval-induced facilitation; see Stone et al., 2012) into discussions of collective forgetting only enhances our appreciation of the phenomenon. The whole may be greater than the sum of the parts, but that does not mean the parts play no role in understanding the whole.
Finally, although we have provided evidence demonstrating how memories may become collectively remembered and forgotten, our analysis has remained ironically silent about whether these converged memories become long-lasting, and in turn, identity forming. While recent evidence suggests that public silence can induce collective forgetting of memories relevant to the group identity of intimate couples (Stone et al., 2013), whether such a mnemonic convergence remains stable over time needs further examination. There is some evidence suggesting that selective public silence may provide enduring mnemonic consequences. For example, researchers have found instances where the effects of RIF can last up to a week (Garcia-Bajos et al., 2009; Storm et al., 2012; Storm et al., 2006; Tandoh and Naka, 2007; cf. MacLeod and Macrae, 2001; Saunders and MacLeod, 2002). Although it is reasonable to assume such findings could similarly be extended to the silence in the context of a conversation (but see Stone, 2011), it has yet to be empirically examined.
Each of these concerns must be taken seriously, but, in our mind, none of them indicate that we should abandon a psychological approach to the formation of collective memory. Rather, they speak to what needs to be done. We need to explore whether the principles of SS-RIF, as we have established here within the context of small groups/single social interactions, generalize to other social contexts, and if so, how; we need to investigate how a similar approach might be applied to other social resources, such as memorials and commemorations; and we need to research the way specific procedures and rules govern different kinds of conversations and how they may influence the role public silence plays in promoting collective forgetting and its stability over time. A study of silence and collective forgetting in particular communities would greatly benefit from approaching each of these issues in terms of the psychology of the individual members comprising that community.
Footnotes
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Louvain University Academia (AUL)/Marie Curie Actions of the European Union and the National Science Foundation (grant #BCS-0819067).