Most collective memory research to date has focused on the temporal distribution of and generational differences in public event representations while not directly addressing the conceptual relationships between different event representations. This study investigates how individuals cluster representations of public events and how sociopolitical identity changes event clustering. Participants judged the similarity of different pairs of key public events and reported their voting behavior. Using multidimensional scaling (MDS), we identified that public events were distinguished based on their political and nonpolitical characteristics; political events were further clustered based on their specific attributes (e.g. power struggles or ethnicity issues). Voting behavior introduced variations into how people clustered political public events. Our findings suggest that collective memories that are formed in relation to a historical and sociopolitical background may be better understood within a network of relationships and at the level of specific cultures/groups rather than at a larger (e.g. national) level.

迄今为止，大多数集体记忆研究都集中在公共事件表示的时间分布和世代差异上，而没有直接解决不同事件表示之间的概念关系。这项研究调查了个人如何聚集公共事件的代表以及社会政治身份如何改变事件聚集。参与者判断关键事件之间的相似性，并报告其投票行为。使用多维标度（MDS），我们确定了公共事件是根据其政治和非政治特征加以区分的。政治事件根据其特定属性（例如，权力斗争或种族问题）进一步分类。投票行为给人们如何聚集政治公共事件带来了变化。