William Hirst
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1542094 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | William Hirst |
| NOMBRES | William |
| APELLIDO | Hirst |
| FIRMA | HIRST W |
| AFILIACIONES | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8506-6492 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 178 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1982 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Owning discoveries of other’s past
This detailed analysis of a fragment of an interview with a Belgian woman about her father’s World War II experiences raises questions about the nature of memory. In the interview, the woman discusses the snippets she knows about her father’s past to construct a narrative about this past. In doing so, she is torn between building a narrative that corresponds to her father’s actual war experience, which remains underspecified, and a coherent narra…
Introduction
This editorial introduces the 10 articles collected in this special issue on micro-memories and theorizes their individual and collective contributions to the field of memory studies. In the special issue, 10 memory scholars analyse the same short strip of interaction: a 3-minute fragment of a Belgian woman talking about her deceased father’s past as a collaborator with the Germans during the Second World War. In this empirical exercise, contribu…
Overestimating the intensity of negative feelings in autobiographical memory
When recalling autobiographical events, people not only retrieve event details but also the feelings they experienced. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of past feelings associated with two consequential and negatively valenced events, i.e. the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 726). By comparing experienced and recalled intensities of negative feelings, we discovered that p…
A day that America will remember
This study explores the topics of flashbulb memory, collective identity, future thinking, and shared representations for a public event. We assessed the memories of the Capitol Riots, which happened in Washington DC, on 6 January 2021. Seventy Belgian and seventy-nine American citizens participated in an online study, in which they freely recalled the unfolding of Capitol Riots and answered questions regarding their memory. Inter-subjects similar…
Emotion language use in narratives of the 9/11 attacks predicts long-term memory
Despite considerable cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating that emotions can influence the encoding and consolidation of memory, research has failed to demonstrate a relationship between self-reported ratings of emotions collected soon after a traumatic event and memory for the event over time. This secondary analysis of data from a multisite longitudinal study of memories of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, asked the question of…
Flashbulb memories
The two authors – one from literary and cultural studies, the other a cognitive psychologist – explore how the interdisciplinary perspective of Memory Studies can broaden and enrich current research efforts on flashbulb memories (FBMs). FBMs are memories of the circumstances in which one learned of a public emotionally charged event, such as 9/11 . Psychological research on FBMs have focused on their cognitive properties, their putative accuracy …
Conversational Roles, Generational Differences and the Emergence of Historical and Personal Memories Surrounding WWII during Familial Discussions
We examined whether and how conversational roles shape the extent to which details and recollections surrounding World War II (WWII) emerge in family conversations. Each family was tasked with collaboratively discussing four topics surrounding WWII specific to Belgium. We then conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The former compared the collaborative recall with each family member’s individual recall; the latter focused on the co…
Breaking from the Past
Frederick Bartlett's Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology offered a radical alternative to the century-old notion that memory was like a storehouse. Bartlett insisted that memories were not stored away, but were reconstructed on the run, with new rendering emerging with each act of reconstruction. As a result, psychologists should study not memory, but remembering, and focus on the social contexts in which remembering takes …
Intergenerational transmission of World War II family historical memories of the Resistance
Collective memory of historical events can be transmitted across generations not only through cultural memory but also through communicative memory; that is, transmitted by people who have lived through these particular times. Yet, few studies have examined the temporal horizon of a particular type of communicative memory: family historical memories. In this article, we examine the intergenerational transmission of memories from the Second World …
Changes over 10 years in the retelling of the flashbulb memories of the attack of 11 September 2001
A flashbulb memory is a highly detailed and vivid autobiographical memory for the circumstances in which one first learned of a surprising, consequential and emotionally arousing event. How retelling of different features of a flashbulb memory changes over time is not totally understood. Moreover, little is known about how the emotional feeling experienced by individuals when they learned about the event modulates these changes. In this study, we…
Remembering the big game
The first study employed a test-retest methodology to assess how fans of a sport recall a championship sporting event. The second study examined how fans of specific sports teams recalled two championship sporting events in which their team either won or lost. Of particular interest was the emergence of a collective memory within fan communities. We assessed memory for the event itself (event memory), with an emphasis on the emergence of a collec…
Do public speeches induce “collective” forgetting? The Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech as a case study
Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon—socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting—helps explain the mnemonic consequences associated with political speeches, in this case, the Bel…
Introduction
Introduction:Unknowability in Psychology and Social Science William Hirst (bio) as nicholas humphrey nicely documents in his erudite essay in this volume, the notion that there is much that is unknowable about humanity has been around for a long time. Of course, people know a great deal about human nature just by observing it. Even infants know implicitly that they will fall off a visual cliff if they crawl a few more feet. Moreover, by the time …
Remembering Covid-19
Guest Editor's Introduction
Guest Editor's Introduction William Hirst (bio) when the editor of this journal asked me to guest-edit an issue on cultural trauma, neither she nor I anticipated that the world would be in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic as the project was winding down. When this special issue was initiated, an exploration of what had become known as "cultural trauma" seemed more of an intellectual undertaking than a plunge into an ongoing crisis. Now, as I wri…
Witnessing and Cultural Trauma
Cultural trauma forms when representations of a public event become collectively shared and viewed as traumatic for the community. There is a place for flashbulb memories – vivid recollections of learning about public, emotionally charged events – in this trauma process, in that these memories allow community members to serve as witnesses of the event and participate in the process of shaping the event’s cultural representation. Inasmuch as most …
Collective Memory from a Psychological Perspective
Forgetting history
Our aim here is to delineate the connection between selective remembering and selective forgetting as it applies to lay historians listening to selective recountings of history. How does what a speaker remembers about a nation’s past shape what is forgotten about the nation’s past for the listener? To address this question, we will discuss psychological research demonstrating the mnemonic consequences of this selectivity with an emphasis on retri…
Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies
Collective mental time travel
We connect two areas of research: psychological research on mental time travel as a way of understanding memory and the interdisciplinary work on collective memory. For individuals, remembering the personal past and imagining the personal future are closely related. We explore whether the link can extend to the collective realm. We review two recent studies that support this hypothesis and outline questions that should be addressed by future rese…
Social Aspects of Memory
No one doubts that memories are shaped by the social context in which they are formed or later remembered. In this essay we focus on how the social context of remembering and memorizing with others shapes the way both the speaker and listener remember the past, what we refer to as collaborative remembering. In addressing the mnemonic consequences of collaborative remembering, we discuss 1) how it shapes what is occurrently remembered in the group…
Contextualizing human memory
International audience
(Induced) Forgetting to form a collective memory
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 …
Remembering in Conversations
People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychological research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (transactive memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative inhibition, information sampling biases, and audience tuning). We next examine how conversational re…
Psychological perspectives on collective memory and national identity
The formation and maintenance of a collective memory depends the psychological efficacy of societal practices. This efficacy builds on the strengths and weakness of human memory. We view the articles in this special issue through a psychological lens in order to explore how the efficacy of the actions of the distinctive linguistic communities in Belgium have preserved some aspects of their past and left other aspects forgotten. We highlight four …
Towards a psychology of collective memory
This article discusses the place of psychology within the now voluminous social scientific literature on collective memory. Many social scientists locate collective memories in the social resources that shape them. For scholars adopting this perspective, collective memories are viewed as transcending individuals; that is, as being "in the world". Others recognise that, in the final analysis, individuals must remember collective as well as individ…
Forgetting the Unforgettable Through Conversation
A speaker's selective recounting of memories shared with a listener will induce both the speaker and the listener to forget unmentioned, related material more than unmentioned, unrelated material. We extended this finding of within-individual and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting to well-rehearsed, emotionally intense memories that are similar for the speaker and listener, but differ in specifics. A questionnaire probed participants' m…
Creating Shared Memories in Conversation
William Hirst and Gerald Echterhoff Creating Shared Memories in Conversation: Toward a Psychology of Collective Memory PROBLEMS OF MEMORY ARE SALIENT IN TODAY'S WORLD: STRUGGLES BY present-day Germans to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, by South Africans to confront the legacy of apartheid, or by East Europeans to deal with those who collaborated with the form er com m unist regimes.' In each instance, at stake is the form a collective memor…
Collective mental time travel
We connect two areas of research: psychological research on mental time travel as a way of understanding memory and the interdisciplinary work on collective memory. For individuals, remembering the personal past and imagining the personal future are closely related. We explore whether the link can extend to the collective realm. We review two recent studies that support this hypothesis and outline questions that should be addressed by future rese…
(Induced) Forgetting to form a collective memory
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 …
Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies
Collective Memory from a Psychological Perspective
Social Influence on Memory
Introduction
This editorial introduces the 10 articles collected in this special issue on micro-memories and theorizes their individual and collective contributions to the field of memory studies. In the special issue, 10 memory scholars analyse the same short strip of interaction: a 3-minute fragment of a Belgian woman talking about her deceased father’s past as a collaborator with the Germans during the Second World War. In this empirical exercise, contribu…
Conversational Roles, Generational Differences and the Emergence of Historical and Personal Memories Surrounding WWII during Familial Discussions
We examined whether and how conversational roles shape the extent to which details and recollections surrounding World War II (WWII) emerge in family conversations. Each family was tasked with collaboratively discussing four topics surrounding WWII specific to Belgium. We then conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The former compared the collaborative recall with each family member’s individual recall; the latter focused on the co…
Do public speeches induce “collective” forgetting? The Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech as a case study
Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon—socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting—helps explain the mnemonic consequences associated with political speeches, in this case, the Bel…
Forgetting history
Our aim here is to delineate the connection between selective remembering and selective forgetting as it applies to lay historians listening to selective recountings of history. How does what a speaker remembers about a nation’s past shape what is forgotten about the nation’s past for the listener? To address this question, we will discuss psychological research demonstrating the mnemonic consequences of this selectivity with an emphasis on retri…
Contextualizing human memory
International audience
Psychological perspectives on collective memory and national identity
The formation and maintenance of a collective memory depends the psychological efficacy of societal practices. This efficacy builds on the strengths and weakness of human memory. We view the articles in this special issue through a psychological lens in order to explore how the efficacy of the actions of the distinctive linguistic communities in Belgium have preserved some aspects of their past and left other aspects forgotten. We highlight four …
The Role of Narratorship and Expertise in Social Remembering
Are individuals more likely to serve as a vehicle for social contagion because they are perceived as experts or because they talk a lot? This study parses the contribution of expertise and narratorship by asking groups of three or four individuals to study variants of a curriculum vitae (CV) and then to recall the CV individually, as a group, and once again individually, with a recognition test following the final recall. The group was falsely le…
Owning discoveries of other’s past
This detailed analysis of a fragment of an interview with a Belgian woman about her father’s World War II experiences raises questions about the nature of memory. In the interview, the woman discusses the snippets she knows about her father’s past to construct a narrative about this past. In doing so, she is torn between building a narrative that corresponds to her father’s actual war experience, which remains underspecified, and a coherent narra…
Flashbulb memories
The two authors – one from literary and cultural studies, the other a cognitive psychologist – explore how the interdisciplinary perspective of Memory Studies can broaden and enrich current research efforts on flashbulb memories (FBMs). FBMs are memories of the circumstances in which one learned of a public emotionally charged event, such as 9/11 . Psychological research on FBMs have focused on their cognitive properties, their putative accuracy …
Remembering Covid-19
Witnessing and Cultural Trauma
Cultural trauma forms when representations of a public event become collectively shared and viewed as traumatic for the community. There is a place for flashbulb memories – vivid recollections of learning about public, emotionally charged events – in this trauma process, in that these memories allow community members to serve as witnesses of the event and participate in the process of shaping the event’s cultural representation. Inasmuch as most …
Acquisition of epistemic and deontic meaning of modals
Modal auxiliaries have an epistemic and deontic sense and range in strength, e.g. must propositions are stronger than may propositions. Children (ages 3; 0–6; 6) heard two contradictory modal propositions of varying strength. In the epistemic condition, the propositions concerned the location of a peanut. In the deontic condition, they were commands by two teachers about what room a puppet should go to. The child was to indicate which command sho…
The amnesic syndrome
The amnesic syndrome
Communication context, explanation, and social judgment
The effects of the communication context on explanations and judgments were investigated in two experiments where participants explained a boy's violent behavior either to a disciplinarian or to a permissive addressee. The results of Study 1 showed that the participants' explanations varied as a function of communication context, but their judgments of responsibility were not influenced. In Study 2, the communication demand was either subtle or b…
Implicit contributions of context to recognition
A Cognitive Taxonomy of Collective Memories
Towards a psychology of collective memory
This article discusses the place of psychology within the now voluminous social scientific literature on collective memory. Many social scientists locate collective memories in the social resources that shape them. For scholars adopting this perspective, collective memories are viewed as transcending individuals; that is, as being "in the world". Others recognise that, in the final analysis, individuals must remember collective as well as individ…
Creating Shared Memories in Conversation
William Hirst and Gerald Echterhoff Creating Shared Memories in Conversation: Toward a Psychology of Collective Memory PROBLEMS OF MEMORY ARE SALIENT IN TODAY'S WORLD: STRUGGLES BY present-day Germans to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, by South Africans to confront the legacy of apartheid, or by East Europeans to deal with those who collaborated with the form er com m unist regimes.' In each instance, at stake is the form a collective memor…
Collective Memory from a Psychological Perspective
Forgetting the Unforgettable Through Conversation
A speaker's selective recounting of memories shared with a listener will induce both the speaker and the listener to forget unmentioned, related material more than unmentioned, unrelated material. We extended this finding of within-individual and socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting to well-rehearsed, emotionally intense memories that are similar for the speaker and listener, but differ in specifics. A questionnaire probed participants' m…
Social Influence on Memory
The Role of Narratorship and Expertise in Social Remembering
Are individuals more likely to serve as a vehicle for social contagion because they are perceived as experts or because they talk a lot? This study parses the contribution of expertise and narratorship by asking groups of three or four individuals to study variants of a curriculum vitae (CV) and then to recall the CV individually, as a group, and once again individually, with a recognition test following the final recall. The group was falsely le…
Psychological perspectives on collective memory and national identity
The formation and maintenance of a collective memory depends the psychological efficacy of societal practices. This efficacy builds on the strengths and weakness of human memory. We view the articles in this special issue through a psychological lens in order to explore how the efficacy of the actions of the distinctive linguistic communities in Belgium have preserved some aspects of their past and left other aspects forgotten. We highlight four …
Introduction
We tend to think of the use of our body for sex as an intensely personal concern. All things being equal, people would prefer that the state keep out of the bedroom. Among other things, sexual acts are extremely pleasurable, bind two or more individuals together, even if only for the briefest period of time, serve as the basis of intense intimacy, allow for reproduction, and, perhaps even more so than religion, inspire countless artists to create…
Remembering in Conversations
People constantly talk about past experiences. Burgeoning psychological research has examined the role of communication in remembering by placing rememberers in conversational settings. In reviewing this work, we first discuss the benefits of collaborative remembering (transactive memory and collaborative facilitation) and its costs (collaborative inhibition, information sampling biases, and audience tuning). We next examine how conversational re…
Contextualizing human memory
International audience
(Induced) Forgetting to form a collective memory
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 …
Social Aspects of Memory
No one doubts that memories are shaped by the social context in which they are formed or later remembered. In this essay we focus on how the social context of remembering and memorizing with others shapes the way both the speaker and listener remember the past, what we refer to as collaborative remembering. In addressing the mnemonic consequences of collaborative remembering, we discuss 1) how it shapes what is occurrently remembered in the group…
Collective mental time travel
We connect two areas of research: psychological research on mental time travel as a way of understanding memory and the interdisciplinary work on collective memory. For individuals, remembering the personal past and imagining the personal future are closely related. We explore whether the link can extend to the collective realm. We review two recent studies that support this hypothesis and outline questions that should be addressed by future rese…
Forgetting history
Our aim here is to delineate the connection between selective remembering and selective forgetting as it applies to lay historians listening to selective recountings of history. How does what a speaker remembers about a nation’s past shape what is forgotten about the nation’s past for the listener? To address this question, we will discuss psychological research demonstrating the mnemonic consequences of this selectivity with an emphasis on retri…
Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies
Collective Memory from a Psychological Perspective
Remembering the big game
The first study employed a test-retest methodology to assess how fans of a sport recall a championship sporting event. The second study examined how fans of specific sports teams recalled two championship sporting events in which their team either won or lost. Of particular interest was the emergence of a collective memory within fan communities. We assessed memory for the event itself (event memory), with an emphasis on the emergence of a collec…
Do public speeches induce “collective” forgetting? The Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech as a case study
Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon—socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting—helps explain the mnemonic consequences associated with political speeches, in this case, the Bel…
Introduction
Introduction:Unknowability in Psychology and Social Science William Hirst (bio) as nicholas humphrey nicely documents in his erudite essay in this volume, the notion that there is much that is unknowable about humanity has been around for a long time. Of course, people know a great deal about human nature just by observing it. Even infants know implicitly that they will fall off a visual cliff if they crawl a few more feet. Moreover, by the time …
Psychology (33 obras) · Cognitive psychology (25 obras) · Memory Processes and Influences (20 obras) · Social Psychology (20 obras) · Identity, Memory, and Therapy (18 obras) · Cognitive science (15 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Collective memory (12 obras) · History (11 obras) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (11 obras)