The Powerful Influence of Collective Memories

How collective memories form group identity and bonding

There are some things that everyone knows within a certain culture or group of people. Similarly, there are collective memories, which can be either positive or negative, a collective trauma, so to speak, within these groups and these shape collective dialogue, actions and behaviours. Let’s explore what this means for society.

Recently, during a day with MBA students, I was having a conversation with a group during a group activity. One of the participants told a story of a funny event that happened in previous company he had been working at. I won’t go into the details, but it includes involuntary nudity at a companywide event. But what was striking is that this particular event become a collective memory in this company and therefore a sense of the shared experiences and stories that create a sense of identity. It was therefore a unifying memory for the company.

In society we have collective memory and learning in many contexts. The most obvious are the collective things we learn such as our history of the country, 1066 being a sacred date in England where I went to school, or collective experiences, England’s football world cup victory in 1966. Similarly other dramatic events shape collective memories. 9/11 is burnt on many people’s members as was the assassination of JFK on a generation previously, or the Hiroshima bomb, for Japan and the world.

The term collective memory was first proposed by philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1925 and when we investigate further, we can see that collective memory follows similar patterns to how memories in a single brain form and become intertwined with sense of identity orientation, worldviews, and guide opinions, attitudes, and behaviours over large groups of people.