Aekoric on 18/12/2013 at 19:36

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I just sent you a PM about that legoman :)

Oh and thank you very much for taking the survey!

Aekoric on 10/1/2015 at 16:58

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I'm not sure if anyone is still interested in this but my master thesis is finally coming to an end.

A little while after I posted my request here a year ago I got an overwhelming push of British participants from all the places I tried to gather some and ended up with around 50 Brits and 70 Americans.

I haven't finished writing my thesis yet (and it would be in german anyway) but I'll give you a brief summary of the results.


The initial idea was, to check if belonging to a group (in this case your nationality) would alter how and which details one would remember from an event (the wikipedia articles). Should the nationality have an effect you'd have situations in which people had different memories from the same event even though both witnessed (or read) the same thing just because one is a fan of FC Arsenal and the other one a fan of Liverpool. Same with nations or any other group though I was particularly interested in culture (represented by the nations which are more convenient to work with).
There is already a name for such a thing: Ingroup favouritism or Ingroup bias. If you are interested in this have a read over at wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroup_bias)

In the end I checked wether British people would remember their own nations actions more positively and American actions as more negative and if the same thing happens for the Americans. In addition I proclaimed that the degree of national identity or patriotism would influence how strongly the effect would present itself with each individual (if there was any effect at all).

I can now say that it doesn't matter which nationality you have; everyone remembered the events in the same way and there also hasn't been any influence of patriotism or national identity.
Funny enough there has been someone who did a rather similar experiment just in the context of Sikhs and Hindus and their violent history and real memories not, like in my case, freshly made memories by reading a long article. And he had strong evidence for culture influencing the participants memory.
It may be the case that the two events I chose weren't recent enough to really influence the participants or that religion (In the Hindu/Sikh research at least) is a stronger part of the identity and it's also a more recent conflict at the same time. Anyway, I'm through with this now and the survey could definitely have been better crafted overall and some dumb decisions could have been avoided, but that's in the past and can't be changed (like putting both long articles for every participant up there to read instead of just giving everyone just one article but making it random so it's not that frustrating to work through the survey).


Thank you guys very much, you've been a great help in completing my research. The vouchers I promised have already been sent out and maybe some or one of you have been lucky to get one!

Aekoric on 11/1/2015 at 14:32

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Yep it's been quite some time :) Thanks again for your help

bassoferrol on 11/1/2015 at 15:10

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Sorry, I found out.

PigLick on 14/1/2015 at 08:02

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Piglicks Rule No 3 : if you can post again in a thread, why edit!?