JARMAC Editor's Choice: December 2018

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We Made History: Citizens of 35 Countries Overestimate Their Nation’s Role in World History

AUTHORS: FRANKLIN ZAROMB, JAMES LIU, DARIO PAEZ, KATJE HANKE, ADAM PUTNAM, & HENRY ROEDIGER

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People are typically proud of their home country, and they show egocentric biases—that is, they tend to interpret events through the lens of people from their own nation. We asked students from 35 countries about the contribution the country in which they were living has made to world history. Students provided high estimates; Russians, for example, estimated that their country was responsible for 61% of world history. Our study provides a measure of national narcissism, and reveals that it differs widely across countries.

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Although we all have different memories from our life experiences, scientists who study memory often assume that the general principles of memory are the same for all healthy adults (e.g., what helps us learn, what kinds of things we tend to remember, how quickly we forget). Some new research from the University of Edinburgh, UK, has argued that we have a range of different memory tools, and that different people use different combinations of those tools in different situations. For example, when trying to learn words in a new language, some people might say the words over to themselves, others might think about whether they sound like words they already know, and still others might try to visualize what the words look like and what they mean. So, there are general principles for how each memory tool works, but how those tools are used varies from one person to another. Such differences between individuals provide important insights into the different memory tools that people have available, how they are used, and how our use of memory tools changes as we get older.