Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Collective Memory And History: An Examination Of Perceptions Of Accuracy And Preference For Biased “History” Passages, Stephanie Doi

CMC Senior Theses

Collective memory is a socially shared representation of the past. History, contrastingly, strives to be an unbiased, objective, and critical account of the past. Many researchers have argued that the so-called “history” found in school textbooks and curriculums align more with collective memory; however, many individuals do not know of the pervasiveness of collective memory in supposed “history” texts. To examine perceptions of accuracy and preference of American “history” textbook passages, individuals from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n= 404) participated in an online study where they were randomly assigned to read one passage that was either negatively biased, neutral, or positively …