Do public speeches induce “collective” forgetting? The Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech as a case study

Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon—socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting—helps explain the mnemonic consequences associated with political speeches, in this case, the Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech. To this end, we analyzed the responses of 43 French speakers and 49 Dutch speakers. Of these individuals, 35 attended to the speech (16 French speakers; 19 Dutch speakers). Our results suggest that the Belgian King’s speech induced French-speaking Belgians who attended the speech to recall less information related to what the King mentioned in the speech. We found no such deficit for Dutch-speaking Belgians. Rather, the Dutch-speaking Belgians exhibited a trend toward greater recall of related and unrelated information when attending relative to not attending to the speach. These results bolster the importance of including a psychological approach in the study of collective memories and the moderating role of social identity.