Social representations of universal history in military Argentinean college students

DELFINO, G. I.; SOSA, F. M.; FERNÁNDEZ, O. D.

San Pablo

Conferencia; 12° Conferencia Internacional sobre Representações Sociais e IV Colóquio Luso-Brasileiro sobre Saúde, Educação e Representações Sociais; 2014

Fundación Carlos Chagas

Social representations of history are crucial to public beliefs about legitimacy of political system and central to justifications for political action (Liu & Hilton, 2005). History is recognized as an important symbolic resource to be mobilized in arguments for and against political regimes and their agendas. Psychologists have begun to examine how people use history to understand why the world is the way that it is, and how tradition and past experience can be used to justify political agendas (cf. Liu et al., 2009). Researchers in the area often use college students? samples in order to achieve cross-cultural comparison. The aim of this work was to explore events and figures of world history in military, given that the social identity of this group could be introducing some interesting features to analyze. A sample of 851 students (85.3 % male, age: M = 21.45, SD = 2,167) was used. Following an open-ended methodology, 27 events and 32 universal figures with their respective assessments were obtained. Events more evoked were: the World Wars, mentioned by more than 50% of participants, followed by the industrial revolution, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the discovery of Americas and the French Revolution. Events arousing most negative feeling are: Atomic Bombings, Nazism, Iraq War and September 11 Bombings. Most positive events are: evolution of humanity, Christianity and Technological Discoveries. Related to figures, 4 of every 5 participants mentioned Hitler and 3 of 5 said Napoleon. Other characters were not evoked by more than 30% in each case, standing out San Martin, Alexander the Great, Columbus, Einstein, Bush and John Paul II. The most negative characters are: Che Guevara and Margaret Thatcher, followed by Saddam Hussein, Lenin, Fidel Castro, Stalin, Bin Laden, Hitler and Marx. The most positive characters are: San Martín, Einstein, John Paul II, Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Newton. Confirming the findings of previous studies, we come upon a Euro/North Americancentric bias, more figures and events are related to war and politics and participants tends to view recent events as more historically significant than those which occurred long ago. We also found a socio-centric bias: participants evoked national-relevant historical events and figures such as San Martin, Che Guevara and Margaret Thatcher (she is relevant because of Falklands War). Socio-centric bias and warfare bias are related with military participants identity.