Historical cognition’s dilemmas: Introduction to the special issue—recent advances in historical cognition

This Special Issue presents papers that draw together recent insights about historical cognition from several social psychologists. Early psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall, Wilhelm Wundt, and Sigmund Freud described histories of “civilization” to explain adult human rationality in European and American cultures of their times. Enthusiasm for experimental methods and individual research subjects quickly widened the gap between psychological and historical explanation. Frederick Bartlett’s (1932) investigations of serial memory aimed to understand how collective memories might be sustained in cultures, but they also signaled a parting of the ways between experimental psychology and social anthropology in Britain. Psychology has since often been viewed as wedding historical scholarship—for better or worse—to theories of the individual subject, as when psychologist Lewis Terman (1941) called on historians to look to IQ tests not texts as their raw materials, or when William Langer asked the American Historical Association in 1958 to integrate psychoanalysis into historical scholarship (Runyan, 1988). Fischer (1970) looked to psychologist David McClelland’s understanding of power motives to imagine a historian’s logic without obvious fallacies. The “subjects” that psychology has offered to seduce historians’ engagement illustrate the history of both disciplines, and position our attempt at recent advances in historical cognition here, which was supported by European Cooperation in Science and Technology through COST Action IS 1205: Social psychological dynamics of historical representations in the enlarged European Union.

Social psychology has always been a somewhat liminal disciplinary endeavor, which might provide a particular vantage point from which to consider the relationship between psychology’s individual subject and historical sense-making. Social psychologists have repeatedly tried to displace the individual as the prime mover in psychology, particularly by drawing attention on the under-estimated effects of the presence of others, groups, situations, and social norms on individuals’ language, thoughts, feelings, and behavior (Collier et al., 1991; Ross and Nisbett, 1991). In the United States, the objectivist social sciences enjoyed unprecedented and unrivaled state support during the cold war (Salovey and Cravens, 2012). During this period, social psychologists developed an elaborate science of group behavior and occasionally ventured historical explanations from the vantage point of laboratory experiments. (Milgram’s (1963) obedience studies were the most ambitious and well-known example, but see also the discussion of “groupthink” in Klein et al., this issue). After the apparent value-neutrality of such work was repeatedly debunked, historicism emerged as a challenge to social psychologists’ claims to grasp generalizable laws of social behavior beyond historical circumstances (Gergen, 1973). Few US social psychologists moved toward social constructionist epistemologies that such historicism implied (but see Gergen, 1985). However, social psychologists in Europe alighted on the individualism of American social psychology as its central, and most damning, ethnocentric assumption (e.g. Israel and Tajfel, 1972).

After this crisis, many social psychologists, particularly in the United States and in Israel, turned to social cognition and studies of judgment and decision-making as ways to sustain a scientific project that focused on how individual people made sense of social events and dilemmas (see Fiske and Taylor, 1991; Kahneman et al., 1982). Social psychologists most often focused on how people attributed social events (see Bruckmuller et al., this issue). These renewed aims at general and generalizable theories of sense-making were grounded in cognitive psychologists’ computational metaphors of how individual human minds constructed meaning. For these reasons, social cognition drew criticism from critics that it had shifted attention inward, and away from the real world and the possibility of its social transformation (Sampson, 1981). Indeed, when social psychology research in East Asian countries showed that patterns of attribution that social psychologists thought to be universal were particular to individualist cultures, attention was directed outward toward “culture” once again (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Miller, 1984). In the late 1980s and afterward, in the United Kingdom and in many commonwealth countries, experimental methods and computational metaphors were wholeheartedly rejected by some in favor of a social psychology grounded in discourse (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Nonetheless, the computational metaphor remains part of the “charter” that binds cognitive scientists together (see Hilton and Liu, this issue). The website of the 2017 London meetings of the Cognitive Science Society notes that

computation provides the most promising means of explaining how the human mind, in all of its richness and diversity, can exist in the physical universe. If this promise is to be fulfilled, then greater effort must be made to connect cognitive science theories to computational foundations. (Anon, n.d.)

As this brief sketch indicates, attribution theory and social cognition failed to fully resolve the challenges of historicism to the experimental project in social psychology. Writing now in 2017, what can we hope from recent advances in historical cognition? Social psychologist, Michael Billig et al. (1988), note that ideological dilemmas created by equally favorable alternatives. Social psychologists who would study historical cognition would appear to be on the horns of such a dilemma. How might social psychologists both do justice to the accumulated knowledge in social psychology of the apparent regularities with which culturally situated individuals actively make sense of the social world and the historical events that would situate such individuals in such very different contexts? Billig et al. (1988) concluded that people rarely resolve dilemmas in a lasting way when they simply favor one principle over others. Social cognition, with its emphasis on the process rather than the content of historical sense-making seems like such a hasty resolution to historicism’s dilemmas. By regarding historicism as presenting a continuing dilemma to social psychologists who might want to study how people make sense of past events, then we might better understand why social psychologists have gone in such different directions to approach the sense that people make of history.

As noted, one approach is to extend social cognition research to examine how ordinary people make sense of history. Social psychologists with applied interests in intergroup relations quickly expanded attribution theory to describe how people made attributions about social and historical events caused by larger identity groups (Pettigrew, 1979). Subsequently, researchers have examined specific collective representations of past events (Pennebaker et al., 1997), and how sense-making about specific past events is affected by investment in specific group identities (see, for example, Nelson et al., 2013; Sahdra and Ross, 2007), intergroup emotions (Doosje et al., 1998; Iyer et al., 2003), and speech acts such as apologies (e.g. Lastrego and Licata, 2010; Paez, 2010). Such studies have aimed to engage deeply with specific historical contexts in ways that early attribution theory often did not (see also Bilewicz et al., this issue).

Aiming at a more general theory, one of us (Klein, 2013) has recently cataloged the contributions of social and cognitive psychology to an understanding of how “lay historians” or “those of us who do not hold a history degree” are engaged in what Ricoeur (2004) calls the historiographic operation in relation to collective memory. Ricoeur (2004) described this operation as having three related parts: the building up of archives, the explanation of the historical events that those archives document and the production of verbal representations of those events, typically in narrative form. Several authors in the present volume draw on this perspective here (Bilewicz et al., this issue; Klar and Bilewicz, this issue).

Another approach is to examine sense-making while sacrificing claims to know about intra-individual psychological processes altogether. Historicist critique of such psychological objects as sexuality (Foucault, 1978), the child (Burman, 1994), the brain (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013) and indeed memory itself (Danziger, 2009) have challenged psychologists to critically reflect on what is historical about their chosen objects of study. Some established concepts such as collective memory and social representations allow ready common ground between sociologists, historians and psychologists (see, for example, Glăveanu and Yamamoto, 2012).

However, such historicism can neglect the possibility that psychology can operate as a meaningful science about individuals. Increasingly, historians of psychology have been urged to move past their acquired position as critics of power-knowledge and to inform and enrich psychologists’ debates about the time courses over which psychological processes occur (e.g. Pettit and Hegarty, 2014). From this point of view, the hermeneutics of suspicion that Ricoeur warned us about need not be the primary attitude of the historian to psychological science. Rather, following authors such as Sedgwick (2003), psychology can be read reparatively for what it knows about its own historical context and as a resource for historical thinking. A case in point is Hubbard’s (2017) recent reading of psychologist June Hopkins (1969), who studied the “lesbian personality” using the Rorschach test. Hubbard reads Hopkins’ construction of the lesbian personality as an unlikely useful lens on historically specific gender category in British psychology at this point in time. In so doing, Hubbard avoids both the erasure of lesbians and the presentist fallacy (Fischer, 1970). To borrow from Klar and Bilewicz (this issue), we ask readers of this journal to read the special issue without “firmly entrenched narrative closure” about the epistemic value that quite traditional psychological research might hold.

Billig et al. (1988) insist that living with an ideological dilemma often demands “living out an opposition, so that one is divided upon it in the failure to achieve a resolution.” (p. 91) To ensure that the authors writing here engaged the dilemmas that historicism poses to social cognition, all were asked to consider when and where their objects of study (analogies, flashbulb memories, conspiracy theories, explanations, etc.) took shape in the history of psychology. Their collective efforts might inform reparative readings of the field of historical cognition. Baruch Fischhoff can—at least with the benefit of hindsight—plausibly be said to have founded the field in 1975. Our conversation with him (Klein, Hegarty & Fischhoff) exemplifies both sides of Gergen’s construction of social psychology as history; this psychologist’s sense-making was situated in a very particular historical context, but is also “historic” for its influence on later historical events. The three papers that follow, on explanation, analogy, and forgetting, lead us to conclude that historical cognition came into being in the decade after Fischhoff’s work.

A second contribution to the periodization of historical cognition comes from the paper by Hilton and Liu. Rather than aim at generalizable theory through a theory of the individual “lay historian,” these authors have focused on the level of the “charter” that holds historical memories among collectives, and on the events that seem to set those charters for large portions of the world’s population. In other words, Hilton and Liu have aimed for a “universal” theory of historical social psychology that is grounded not in “process” first but equally in the contents of historical cognition. World War II seems to have set a “global charter,” such that this globally relevant event has shaped the current implicit definition of “us” among many more “peoples” around the world than any other single “event.” This approach offers the possibility of a psychology that is shaped by a rich “eventful” history (Sewell, 2005, see also Pettit and Hegarty, 2014) that might provide a more dynamic understanding of the contexts in which individuals think, than very general distinctions between individualist and collectivist peoples.

Hilton and Liu (this issue) notion of contestable, but often uncontested, social charters suggests that individuals might wrestle with competing working narratives of the past to varying degrees. Indeed, the phenomenon of retrieval-induced forgetting provides an individualist model of memory that helps to anchor our understanding of how such collective processes might occur (see Stone et al., this volume). Individuals likely also differ in their endorsement of charters, both because they vary in their identifications with the “peoples” that charters define and because people vary in their tolerance for uncertainty about what “our” past has been. These themes are explored in new empirical work presented here by Bilewicz et al. (this issue) and Klar and Bilewicz (this issue). While these papers suggest the value of ordinary people’s open-ended historical cognition, Van Prooijen and Douglas work on conspiracy theories calls such open-ended thinking into question. Conspiracy theorizing is engendered by moments of crisis and is motivated to resolve the anxious emotions that crisis can bring. While “lay censors” appear unwilling to rethink the past enough, “conspiracy theorists” seem too ready to problematically overthink past events. Moreover, both overthinking and underthinking the past can fail to achieve very much. For all their narrative exuberance, conspiracy theorists gain little solace from the angst that incites their active cognition in the first place. On the contrary, lay censors entrust the security of their society to received wisdom about the past, but risk the security of their democratic freedoms in the process. To resolve this ideological dilemma about how much we ought to think about the past, it is perhaps worth remembering that social psychologists’ definitions of “bias” do not refer to disparities from truth per se or from some normative benchmark of trust in received wisdom versus the products of one’s own creation. Rather, “bias” can be defined by a failure to remain aware that one’s own selective and active thinking is responsible for many of the conclusions that one draws as a result of thinking about something deeply (Ross and Nisbett, 1991). Both lay censors and conspiracy theorists seem prone to “bias” if framed in such terms. Put simply, the lay historian is a better teller of stories than an author of footnotes.

We end this issue with Luminet and Spijkerman’s paper because it best exemplifies a productive working-through of the dilemmas of historical cognition. Luminet and Spijkerman demonstrate how psychological science about historical cognition, when read reparatively, can provide original frames of reference for historians’ approaching archival material. They also bring us back to the invention of historical cognition in the 1970s and argues that our memory of the canonical study of flashbulb memories may itself be an invented or distorted one. Accordingly, this article appears as an optimistic sign of what memory studies might gain from ongoing advances in historical cognition.