Remembering the self in cultural contexts: A cultural dynamic theory of autobiographical memory

A cultural dynamic theory of autobiographical memory

Drawing inspiration from dynamic systems theories that view human development as a result of dynamic interaction between person and context (Thelen and Smith, 2006), I propose a cultural dynamic theory of autobiographical memory. This theory intends to provide an explanatory framework to synthesize existing data and, furthermore, a coherent guide to further systematic investigation. Notably, the analysis is constrained by current literature that has focused on the comparison between Western, particularly European American, and East Asian samples, which are heterogeneous themselves. Nevertheless, the theory is intended to transcend specific geographical locations and to illuminate the dynamic impact of culture on autobiographical remembering. The theory comprises three major themes: autobiographical memory takes place in the dynamic transaction between an active individual and his or her changing environment; it is situated in culturally conditioned time and space over a multitude of timescales; and it develops in the process of children acquiring cultural knowledge about the self and the purpose of the past through early socialization (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The cultural dynamic system of autobiographical memory.

According to this theme, autobiographical memory is not formed in isolation, in the individual mind, but is thoroughly contextual. It can be viewed as an open system immersed in the cultural milieu where the individual is in constant transaction with the environment. In the end, autobiographical memory takes shape as a joint product of the individual and the cultural agenda of the society. In line with the theoretical analysis, research has confirmed that cultural variables give rise to individual and group differences in memory (Wang, 2013b). Studies on the influence of cultural self-goals on memory content and valence can serve as an example here (Wang, 2001, 2008; Wang and Ross, 2005).

Self-goals modulate the process of remembering by determining what information gets encoded and consolidated into memory, and by prioritizing access to goal-relevant information and inhibiting the irrelevant or contradictory information at recall (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Critically, fundamental self-goals, such as autonomy, relatedness, self-enhancement, and self-improvement, although universally exist, are variously emphasized in different cultures (Wang, 2013b). The culturally prioritized self-goals often remain chronically activated and readily guide the remembering process. Thus, cultural groups that prioritize autonomous self-goals, as European Americans often do, may focus on event information concerning one’s own roles, actions, feelings, and predilections that accentuates the uniqueness and agency of the individual. Such information is likely to be well represented in memory and highly accessible during recall. In contrast, cultural groups that prioritize relational self-goals, as East Asians often do, may focus on and remember information about collective activities and significant others.

This is indeed what cross-cultural research has shown. Whereas European Americans often recall memories of unique personal experiences with idiosyncratic details (e.g. successes, fears, and nightmares), East Asians often recall memories focusing on the roles of others and social interactions (e.g. school activities, family outings, and disputes with neighbors; Wang, 2001, 2004, 2006a, 2008; Wang and Conway, 2004). The culturally prioritized self-goals are further related to memory content at the individual level. Regardless of culture, individuals who exhibit heightened autonomous self-goals also recall more self-focused memories, compared with those who exhibit heightened relational self-goals (Wang, 2001, 2004).

The connection between culturally prioritized self-goals and memory content has further been observed through experimental priming of a particular self-goal, which then increases the retrieval of memory content pertaining to that self-goal. In one study by Wang and Ross (2005), European American and Asian college students were asked to describe themselves as either unique individuals (i.e. autonomous-self prime) or as members of social groups (i.e. relational-self prime). They then recalled their earliest childhood memories. In both cultural groups, those whose autonomous self-goals were activated prior to the recall reported more self-focused memories, whereas those whose relational self-goals were made salient recalled more socially oriented memories. Memory content thus reflected the particular self-goals being primed.

In a similar vein, self-goals for enhancement versus improvement are variously emphasized across cultures, which, in turn, influence the valence of memories. Western, particularly European American, cultures endorse the pursuit and maintenance of a positive sense of self—self-enhancement goals, whereas many Asian cultures emphasize the actual change and improvement in the self—self-improvement goals (Endo and Meijer, 2004; Oishi, 2002). Accordingly, Western individuals often dwell on past events that boost their positive self-views, where East Asians are just as likely, if not more, to attend to events that provide opportunities for self-criticism as to attend to feeling-good events. For example, in one study, Endo and Meijer (2004) asked American and Japanese college students to recall as many incidences as they could of success and failure that they had experienced in their lives. Americans recalled considerably more success stories than failure stories, whereas Japanese recalled slightly more failure stories than success stories.

Thus, cultural variables such as the prioritized self-goals modulate information processing by channeling cognitive processes and resources into the remembering of confirmatory information and inhibiting or revising contradictory information and eventually determine which events and which aspects of the events are most likely to be retained, accessible, and enduring. Autobiographical remembering takes place not just in the individual mind but is immersed in the cultural milieu where “mind and culture make each other up” (Shweder, 1990: 1).

According to this theme, cultural variables can affect what, how, and whether at all event information becomes encoded and consolidated in memory and whether the information remains accessible at retrieval. The memories can further change overtime given our new cultural experiences and evolving perspectives (Dudai and Edelson, 2016). Studies on memory content and valence have revealed cultural influences on all stages of remembering. For instance, in the study by Wang and Ross (2005) described earlier, the retrieval of memory content was influenced by the activation of culturally prioritized self-goals in European Americans and Asians. Still, cultural differences in memory content persisted regardless of priming manipulations. These findings suggest that cultural discrepancies in recall reflect both the cognitive frame at the time of retrieval and how information is originally represented in memory (for a detailed discussion, see Wang, 2013b). Research on perceptual styles has further shed light on cultural influences on memory encoding in particular, which can then affect accessibility and even availability of memories (Wang, 2009, 2013b).

It has been observed that East Asians show lower accessibility to autobiographical memories than Westerners not only for distant (e.g. childhood) events (Wang, 2001; Wang et al., 2004), but also for very recent (e.g. yesterday or today) events (Oishi et al., 2011; Wang, 2009). For the latter, given the proximity between the time of the events and the memory task, the cultural difference may reflect different processes of encoding. In a study to test this hypothesis (Wang, 2009), Asian and European American college students were presented with a narrative text. They were asked to segment the text into discrete events, indicating wherever, in their judgment, one meaningful event ended and another event began. Asians, who often engage in holistic perceptual processing and thus view different objects or events as interrelated (Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005), perceived few discrete episodes in the continuous flux of information. In comparison, European Americans, who habitually engage in analytic perceptual processing and thus attend to salient features of individual objects or events (Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005), segmented the flux of information into a greater number of unique episodes. Thus, Asians perceived and encoded fewer event episodes than did European Americans as the experience unfolded. The cultural difference in event perception and encoding has direct consequences for memory. At an immediate recall test following reading the narrative text, Asians recalled fewer event episodes from the text than European Americans (Wang, 2009). The differential encoding processes may also explain the findings that Asians consistently exhibit lower memory specificity than European Americans, whereby they are more inclined to recall general routine events even when explicitly instructed to recall specific episodes (e.g. Wang, 2001, 2004, 2006a; Wang and Conway, 2004; Wang and Ross, 2005).

Additional evidence for cultural influences on memory encoding came from another study that examined perception and recall using a random sampling method (Wang, 2013a). Participants were sent a text message three times a day during a 1-week period and were asked to record as soon as they received the message what was happening during the past 30 minutes. At the end of the week, they received a surprise memory test for the events that they had recorded. The immediate event entry reflects the amount of episodic detail being perceived and encoded, and the delayed recall tabulates retention and retrieval. Among Asians, those who moved to the United States at an earlier age and were therefore likely more Americanized perceived and, subsequently, recalled more event details than those who moved at an older age.

Taken together, culture exerts influence over the course of remembering, affecting not only retention and recall but perception and encoding as well. Cultural variables such as perceptual styles modulate the encoding process, influencing whether and how event information is structured and represented in memory, and further determining what and how much people remember.

According to this theme, early socialization institutionalizes cultural values, beliefs, and ideologies to impart culture-specific modes of autobiographical remembering in children. Early mnemonic practices of socialization agents may be eventually translated into children’s own memory operations. One such practice that has been shown to be particularly important for the development of autobiographical memory is parent–child sharing memories (Fivush and Merrill, 2016; Nelson and Fivush, 2004). Parents discuss past events with their young children, during which they model to children what to remember, how to remember, and why to remember it, thus instilling in children purposes and ways of remembering the personal past appropriate to their cultural assumptions (Wang and Brockmeier, 2002).

Autobiographical memories with idiosyncratic details and subjective perspectives are considered a critical ingredient for the establishment of individuality and autonomy that are highly valued in Western cultures. Accordingly, European American parents share memories with their children more frequently, more elaborately, and more child-focused, compared with East Asian parents who emphasize the development of relatedness and a sense of belonging (Wang, 2013b). For instance, in a study of naturally occurring conversations between mothers and their 3-year-old children, Mullen and Yi (1995) observed that European American mothers discussed past events with their children three times as often as did Korean mothers. Studies have further shown that, during memory sharing, European American mothers often let their children take the lead, encourage children to contribute to the conversation by providing rich details about what happened, and frequently elaborate on children’s own roles, perspectives, and feelings in the past events. Such conversations create an opportunity for children to learn to construct elaborate stories about their personal past. East Asian mothers, in contrast, tend to expect their children to follow their lead, pose and repeat factual questions for short answers, and orient the conversation to social interactions and behavioral expectations (Fivush and Wang, 2005; Miller et al., 1997; Wang and Fivush, 2005; Wang et al., 2000). Such conversations focus on reinforcing the position of the mother as an authority figure, helping children learn lessons from the past, and assimilating children into a larger collective. Similar cultural differences in mother–child reminiscing have also been observed in comparisons between European Americans and Turks (Sahin-Acar and Leichtman, 2015) and between Germans and Cameroonians and Indians (Schröder et al., 2013).

Children as young as 3 years appear to have already adopted their mothers’ ways of memory sharing into remembering personal experiences. European American children often recall more elaborate, more specific, more self-focused, and less socially oriented memories than do their Asian peers (Han et al., 1998; Peterson et al., 2009; Wang, 2004). Furthermore, maternal style of memory sharing serves as a potent mediator in explaining cultural differences in children’s autobiographical memory (Wang, 2006b, 2007). In a cross-cultural longitudinal study, European American, Chinese, and immigrant Chinese American mothers and their children shared memories three times at home, when children were 3, 3.5, and 4.5 years of age (Wang, 2007). Across all time points, European American mothers carried out more elaborate and more child-focused conversations than mothers of the two Chinese groups. Mothers’ provision of event details facilitated children’s memory both concurrently and over the long term, such that European American children recalled more details of the memory events than their Chinese peers. Interestingly, mothers’ provision of details was positively associated with their endorsement of autonomous self-goals, and negatively related to their endorsement of relational self-goals.

Thus, the structural organization of family memory sharing activities takes shape in a culturally situated context comprising culturally prescribed role-negotiation between parents and children (e.g. hierarchical or equal), parents’ implicit and explicit child-rearing goals (e.g. to establish autonomy or relatedness), general cultural beliefs about personal remembering (e.g. the function of memory), and the culture’s prevailing views of selfhood. Growing up in such different narrative environments, children learn to formulate stories about themselves and gradually take over their parents’ values and styles in remembering the past. This process ensures the intergenerational transmission of culture-specific genres of autobiographical remembering.

Implications for collective memory and foresight

The cultural dynamic theory construes autobiographical memory as an open system that emerges, develops, and transforms under the multitude of influences of culture. It provides a framework to understand and predict the effects of cultural variables on autobiographical remembering. The theory further illustrates that memories and the practices of remembering are conditioned by culture to serve goals and purposes important to specific cultural contexts. Thus, the scripted and other-focused autobiographical memory among Asians, although likely being viewed as unconventional or even maladaptive in the Western context, confirms relational self-goals privileged in Asian cultures. Detailed and idiosyncratic remembering of one’s unique experiences, as much as being regarded as a critical developmental achievement in Western cultures that prioritize autonomous self-goals, may signal excessive focus on oneself and is therefore incongruent with Asian cultural norms. The ultimate stance of autobiographical remembering reflects individuals’ responses, conscious or unconscious, to varied cultural expectations. This constructive process can further fluctuate across everyday contexts and settings, most notable among bicultural and multicultural individuals (Wang, 2008; Wang et al., 2010). In line with the theory, future studies will continue to identify cultural variables that affect aspects of autobiographical memory, delineate their effects on various stages of remembering, and examine how they are transmitted to children through early socialization.

The cultural dynamic theory of autobiographical memory can further shed light on collective memory and foresight. The dynamic influence of culture on autobiographical memory forges a culture-specific mode of remembering in a given community (e.g. self-focused recollection with idiosyncratic details to promote positive views of oneself). This mode of remembering is understood, appreciated, and shared among the members of the community and is passed on from one generation to the next. It may be considered a sort of procedural collective memory that guides how individuals in the community habitually interpret, remember, and share their personal past. Being widely spread, it may further become the dominant mode of communication in the community so that it is not only the way of personal remembering but also the way of collective remembering, thus affecting the formation of collective memory and cultural memory.

There is evidence to support this proposal, whereby, for instance, Americans are just as self-focused in their collective memories as in their personal memories. In one study, middle-aged adults from the United States (all European Americans), England, Germany, Turkey, and China were asked to recall as many memories as they could of public events occurring in their lifetime (Wang et al., 2009). They were then asked to recall specific personal details of first learning of each event, including when, where, who, whom, and what. Such memory for information about the initial reception contexts is commonly referred to as flashbulb memory. Compared with other cultural groups, Americans, who are most dedicated to autonomous self-goals, were more likely to recall domestic events (e.g. John F Kennedy (JFK) assassination) and less likely to recall foreign events (e.g. 4 June Tiananmen Square Incident in China). Americans also recalled twice as many flashbulb memory details for domestic events as for foreign events, and such a difference was absent in all other groups. Thus, culture-specific mode of personal remembering appears to be translated into culture-specific mode of collective remembering.

The dynamic influence of culture on autobiographical memory may similarly take place on the formation of foresight. This is in line with theoretical proposals that view autobiographical memory as raw materials that individuals use to simulate possible future episodes (Schacter, 2012; also see Conway et al., 2016; Merck et al., 2016; Schacter and Madore, 2016). Given that Westerners remember their autobiographical experiences in greater episodic detail and specification, they can utilize the rich sensory–perceptual–emotional details stored in their memory “data base” to simulate potential future events and consequently should be able to generate more detailed future events, when compared with Asians. We have obtained just this result. For example, in one study, Chinese and European American college students were interviewed about past and future personal events (Wang et al., 2011). It was found that European Americans produced more specific details than Chinese for both past and future events. The parallel cultural differences in autobiographical memory and future simulation have also been found among children (Wang et al., 2014), and in parent–child conversations about past and future events (Sahin-Acar and Leichtman, 2015; Wang and Koh, 2015).

Culture may further influence the constructive process of future simulation from past experience. Specifically, cultural knowledge may modulate the sampling and recombining of relevant memory details, provide a conceptual framework to organize these details, and further supplement a contextual background for interpreting the generated future event. We have examined one form of cultural knowledge, dialecticism, in how people perceive change in the construction of future events from the past (Wang et al., 2015). Dialecticism views change as a natural way of life and the world as in constant flux. Although dialecticism can be traced back to both ancient Eastern and Western philosophical thoughts and has profoundly influenced the ways of thinking, it is found to be particularly prominent among East Asians (Peng and Nisbett, 1999). Consequently, Asians may be more likely than Westerners to anticipate changes in their futures. To investigative this question, we asked Asian and European American college students to recall positive and negative personal events of various situations (Wang et al., 2015). Following each recall, they imagined a future personal event involving the same situation. As we expected, a considerable percentage of the participants expected the future events to change in either positive or negative directions, and Asians anticipated greater changes than did European Americans.

Taken together, the cultural dynamic theory of autobiographical memory provides unique insights into the formation of collective memory and the construction of future events. It can help to guide future agendas in these areas of research. For example, one fruitful line of inquiry would be to investigate the connection between the personal mode of remembering and the collective mode of remembering and the underlying mechanism and developmental origin that establishes the collection. Studies should also examine how cultural variables affect different phases of future simulation from the past. Viewing collective memory and foresight, just like autobiographical memory, as open systems immersed in the cultural milieu may open the door to whole new ways of investigation.