The idea that the past holds lessons for the present, under the guise of historical analogies, is prevalent in political and public discourse. Those analogies are often accompanied by dire warnings befalling those who "forget" or otherwise neglect the powerful lessons of History-and would then be "doomed to repeat it", as the saying goes. So, Would remembering history make it seem more OR LESS likely to repeat itself in the future? In other words, does exposure to specific lessons about past events, especially ones involving causal claims, affect how people expect real-life events to turn out? Four studies (three preregistered) tested this experimentally. In Studies 1 and 2, participants expected the same behavior (the US adopting a harsh stance against Iran in the Nuclear Treaty) to result in a more negative outcome when this current stance seemed to match a "lesson" they had read about the break-out of World War II (European leaders adopting a harsh approach against Germany in the 1919 Versailles Treaty vs. a conciliatory approach in the 1938 Munich Agreement). Studies 3 and 4 attempted to eliminate some confounds present in the first two studies and to generalize the effect to different events. While results varied across studies, an internal meta-analysis indicated that the analogical effect on predictions (d = -.08) tended to become stronger as participants' knowledge about the target situation decreased (d-1SD = -.24). These findings support the possibility of analogical-based predictive effects for real-life political events, and are discussed in light of their research and political implications.

中文翻译：

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当历史似乎重演时：接触过去的经验教训会影响对当前政治事件的预测。

在历史类比的幌子下，过去为现在提供教训的想法在政治和公共话语中普遍存在。这些类比往往伴随着可怕的警告，那些“忘记”或以其他方式忽视历史的强大教训的人会“注定要重蹈覆辙”，正如俗话所说。那么，记住历史是否会使它在未来重演的可能性更大或更小？换句话说，接触过去事件的具体教训，尤其是那些涉及因果关系的教训，会影响人们对现实生活中事件结果的预期吗？四项研究（三项预注册）对此进行了实验测试。在研究 1 和 2 中，参与者预计，同样的行为（美国在核条约中对伊朗采取强硬立场）会导致更负面的结果，而当前的立场似乎与他们读到的关于二战爆发的“教训”相符（欧洲领导人在 1919 年的《凡尔赛条约》中对德国采取严厉的态度，而在 1938 年的《慕尼黑协定》中采取和解的态度）。研究 3 和 4 试图消除前两项研究中存在的一些混淆，并将影响推广到不同的事件。虽然研究结果各不相同，但一项内部荟萃分析表明，随着参与者对目标情况的了解减少（d-1SD = -.24），对预测的类比效应（d = -.08）往往会变得更强。