Speaker
Glenn Adams, University of Kansas
Title
On the Measurement and Correlates of Historical Consciousness
Abstract
A diverse group of writers—including George Lipsitz, Bob Marley, Charles W. Mills, and George Orwell, to name only a few—have emphasized the importance of historical consciousness for making sense of current events. (Indeed, this might be a defining motivation for the discipline of history and history education.) At the same time, these writers have also noted that understandings of the past are not simply a result of neutral engagement with objective facts. Instead, people necessarily construct understandings of the past in light of current events, and they invest these understandings with current motivational concerns. In this presentation, I will discuss a program of scientific research designed to investigate correlates of historical consciousness. I will first describe a series of studies in which we used a signal detection paradigm to measure American participants’ knowledge of past events, especially incidents of collective wrongdoing. Across these studies, we observed that accurate knowledge of past wrongdoing—that is, correct identifying consensually documented incidents as true (hits), without incorrectly claiming fabricated incidents as true (false alarms)—was positively associated with perception of racism in US society, support for social justice policy, opposition to unilateral military action, and support for the Iran nuclear deal. I will then discuss ongoing attempts to assess historical consciousness and determine its relationship to understanding of current events. The goal of the presentation is to stimulate a discussion about definition, measurement, and correlates of historical consciousness.
Bio
Glenn Adams is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cultural Psychology Research Group at the University of Kansas. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University with training in the perspective of cultural psychology under the supervision of Hazel Rose Markus. His graduate training included two years of field research in Ghana, which provided the empirical foundation for his research on cultural-psychological foundations of enemyship (and relationality in general). His current work applies a cultural psychology perspective as a form of decolonial praxis for thinking through such topics as relationality, racialized knowledge and ignorance, collective memory, and hegemonic scientific conceptions of well-being (e.g., as personal growth or developmentality).