Social Representations of universal history in military argentinean college students

DELFINO, G.; SOSA, F .; FERNÁNDEZ, O.

Conferencia; XII International Conference on Social Representations; 2014

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: 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 and the French Revolution. Events arousing most negative feeling are: Atomic Bombings,