The Lay Historian: How Ordinary People Think about History

Resumo

Social psychology has mainly studied collective memory as a collectively shared content i.e., as a social representation. By contrast, cognitive psychology appraises memory with little interest in its content and at a generally individual level. In this chapter, I suggest a middle ground between these two approaches by presenting a new metaphor of how ordinary folks think about history: the “lay historian”. I consider how historians’ approaches to the past may find parallels in ordinary people’s construction of historical representations. In order to do so, I borrow from Paul Ricoeur’s (2000) distinction between three steps involved in historical research: documentary, explanatory and representational. I show that these steps can find parallels in cognitive analyses of memory: The first process can be approached in terms of source memory; the second in terms of causal attribution and the third in terms of social psychological models of communication. A special focus is placed on the interaction between these processes as they occur both in historical research and in the elaboration of historical memory. These parallels also highlight novel paths to future research. In turn, this metaphor may be used as a heuristic tool for comparing historians’ and ordinary people’s appraisals of the past.