ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the resources and processes people use when actively thinking about the collective past, for instance when mobilising collective memory to understand a current and problematic event. Through a qualitative and dialogical experiment – that investigates how people react to different “voices” about a conflict and its historical roots – it investigates how historical representations are constructed and utilised. In particular, the reactions of Polish participants to the Ukrainian conflict with Russia that started in 2014 are analysed and used to illustrate the different resources available to people when thinking about the past as well as twelve psychological processes that contribute to historical thinking. A model of historical representations is then proposed, centred on meaning, sense, factual knowledge, and schema. This chapter concludes by arguing that the ways in which we think about the collective are shaped by the tensions between objective and subjective perspectives on what happened, and between local understandings and the generalisations we and others have drawn.
