Remembering the 2006 Football World Cup in Germany: Epistemic and social consequences of perceived memory sharedness

Abstract

According to shared-reality theory, the sharing of memories satisfies the need for confident knowledge (an epistemic consequence) and belongingness (a social-affiliative consequence). In two experiments, German participants remembered a public event with collective importance—the 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Germany. We examined whether inducing perceptions of sharedness increases confidence in one’s memory of the event (an epistemic consequence) and social identification with the national group (an affiliative consequence). Because episodic, but not semantic, memories entail the reconstruction of the social context of the original experience, they should elicit feelings of shared relevance to a greater extent than do semantic memories. Consistent with our rationale, memory confidence, perceptions of shared relevance, and identification with Germany were enhanced after participants recalled episodic (vs semantic) memories regarding the World Cup. In Experiment 2, we added a more direct manipulation of perceived sharedness: participants were asked to think about people with similar (vs dissimilar) memories. We found that memory confidence, perceptions of shared relevance, and identification with Germany were greater in the high sharedness conditions. In both experiments, the effects on memory confidence and identification were mediated by perceived shared relevance. Overall, the findings demonstrate important cognitive and social consequences of collective memory.