Breaching of the U.S. Capitol: memory and moral judgment

Collective memories play important social roles for individuals within society. Although other types of memory content (e.g. autobiographical and associative memory) appear to guide decision-making in social and moral contexts, it is unclear how or whether collective memories are associated with third-person moral evaluations. Also, updating third-person moral evaluations can be impacted by broader narrative contexts. The primary goal of the present study was to determine whether particular collective memory details (described here as prioritised details) associated with a specific event (i.e. the breaching of the U.S. Capitol building) or other related collective memories (described here as general event memories), are associated with evaluations of groups of U.S. Senators, based on whether they followed their intended voting behaviour, or changed their voting behaviour following the breaching. Liberal participants' prioritised memories included more details overall than conservatives', and the more details liberals retrieved, the more they differentiated evaluations of the Senator groups. Liberals and conservatives showed a positive correlation between prioritised memory details and the number of general event memories retrieved, but general event memories were not associated with subsequent evaluations of Senators. These findings point to a role for specific details from collective memories in third-person evaluations.