In their pursuit of a moral ingroup identity, groups tend to flatter and deceive themselves, leading to predictable biases in their collective memory. Specifically, such memory biases are expected in the form of worse memory for morally problematic acts of historical perpetration. In five high-powered recall and recognition experiments (N = 3,424) using between- (Studies 1–4) and within-subjects designs (Study 5) as well as historically accurate (all studies), randomly sampled (Studies 3–4) stimulus material in three contexts (Germany, the UK, the U.S.), we tested whether individual memories of collective events can be distorted not only in a way that attenuates ingroup-threatening perpetration information but also in a way that highlights morally affirming victimhood information. Deviating from expectations, none of our studies revealed significant differences in memory performance depending on the ingroup's role as victim or perpetrator. Instead, equivalence testing (Studies 4–5) even rejected the presence of the minimal effect size we defined to support the proposed memory bias. We discuss the implications of this absence of individual memory distortions for the formation of social representations of history.

在追求道德的群体认同时，群体往往会奉承和欺骗自己，从而导致他们的集体记忆出现可预测的偏见。具体来说，这种记忆偏差预计会以对道德上有问题的历史犯罪行为的较差记忆的形式出现。在五个高能召回和识别实验中（N = 3,424) 在三种情况下（德国、英国、美国)，我们测试了个人对集体事件的记忆是否可以被扭曲，不仅可以削弱威胁内部群体的犯罪信息，还可以突出道德上肯定的受害信息。出乎意料的是，我们的研究均未显示记忆表现的显着差异取决于内群体作为受害者或肇事者的角色。相反，等效性测试（研究 4-5）甚至拒绝了我们定义的最小效应大小的存在，以支持所提出的记忆偏差。