1 Department of Psychology, Carleton College.
2 Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis.
Psychol Sci. 2018 Sep;29(9):1414-1422. doi: 10.1177/0956797618772504. Epub 2018 Jun 18.
Collective narcissism-a phenomenon in which individuals show excessively high regard for their own group-is ubiquitous in studies of small groups. We examined how Americans from the 50 U.S. states ( N = 2,898) remembered U.S. history by asking them, "In terms of percentage, what do you think was your home state's contribution to the history of the United States?" The mean state estimates ranged from 9% (Iowa) to 41% (Virginia), with the total contribution for all states equaling 907%, indicating strong collective narcissism. In comparison, ratings provided by nonresidents for states were much lower (but still high). Surprisingly, asking people questions about U.S. history before they made their judgment did not lower estimates. We argue that this ethnocentric bias is due to ego protection, selective memory retrieval processes involving the availability heuristic, and poor statistical reasoning. This study shows that biases that influence individual remembering also influence collective remembering.
集体自恋——一种个体对自己所在群体表现出过高评价的现象——在小群体研究中无处不在。我们通过询问 50 个美国州的美国人（N=2898）“您认为您所在的州对美国历史的贡献占多大比例？”来研究美国人对美国历史的记忆。各州的平均估计值从 9%（爱荷华州）到 41%（弗吉尼亚州）不等，所有州的总贡献为 907%，表明强烈的集体自恋。相比之下，非居民对各州的评价要低得多（但仍然很高）。令人惊讶的是，在人们做出判断之前，向他们提问并不会降低估计值。我们认为，这种民族中心主义偏见是由于自我保护、涉及可用性启发式的选择性记忆检索过程以及统计推理能力差所致。这项研究表明，影响个体记忆的偏见也会影响集体记忆。
