Work

Do people across the world want to remember positive ingroup histories?

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: = 7,665 ratings of 360 unique events), we found that events viewed as involving the ingroup in an agentic manner were considered important to remember in most countries. At the same time, we observed notable cross-national variation in the willingness to preserve events in which the ingroup caused positive consequences, behaved morally, or experienced threats, with a stronger tendency to remember ingroup-favoring history in less individualistic or less globally connected countries. We discuss how these findings bridge a crucial empirical gap by demonstrating that identity protection likely represents only one component of collective remembrance, whose importance appears to vary considerably across countries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000513