Distorted memories of the corona pandemic
02.11.2023 16:26
In an article that has just been published in the renowned journal “Nature,” researchers from Germany, Austria and the USA show how social polarization distorts our memory of the corona pandemic and thus makes it more difficult to prepare for future crises.
In May 2023, the World Health Organization lifted the global Corona health emergency and thus initiated a phase of evaluation. The effectiveness and appropriateness of political measures from mandatory masks to lockdowns are assessed within and across different countries. The aim of this process should be to enable better preparation for future crises. However, an accurate analysis of the pandemic first requires a look back at the past as precisely as possible, especially on the question of how our perceptions and behavior back then could shape our future attitudes.
In several comprehensive studies, a research team from Bamberg, Chicago, Erfurt and Vienna has now examined how retrospective narratives of historical events of the corona pandemic can be distorted by perceptions of the current situation. The researchers were particularly interested in how different attitudes influence the distortion of memories. To do this, they primarily looked at whether the respondents were vaccinated against Corona or unvaccinated and how much they identified with this vaccination status. The surprising result: depending on how much vaccinated or unvaccinated people identify with their vaccination status, the memories are distorted in different directions.
“In some of our studies, respondents from Germany and Austria answered questions about their risk perceptions, their protective behavior and their trust in government and science at two points in time, for the first time in the first year of the pandemic and a second time at the turn of the year 2022/2023. In the second survey, they were also asked to recall their perceptions and behaviors during the first year of the pandemic. “In this way, their memories could be compared with the answers that were actually given,” explains Philipp Sprengholz from the University of Bamberg, one of the two first authors of the research article in the journal Nature. Through several studies with over 10,000 respondents, the researchers were able to determine to what extent memories of their own statements from the past depended on current perceptions and behavior and whether vaccinated and unvaccinated people differ in their memories.
Vaccinated and unvaccinated people misremembered in different directions
Both vaccinated and unvaccinated people showed memory distortions, but surprisingly in opposite directions. For example, vaccinated people overestimated their perceived risk of infection at the time and their trust in science, while unvaccinated people tended to underestimate both in retrospect. Since memories partially improved when respondents received money for particularly accurate memories, the researchers conclude that the memory distortions are at least partially motivated and cannot be explained by mere forgetting.
Personal motivations polarize memories
In addition, the study results show that when risk perceptions, protective behavior and trust in government and science were underestimated to a greater extent at the time, political measures were retrospectively perceived as less appropriate. In a study with respondents from a total of ten countries, more negative evaluations of political measures during the pandemic were also associated with a stronger desire to punish politicians and scientists for their actions during the pandemic and to dismantle the entire political order. Unsurprisingly, these respondents also said they do not intend to follow regulations in future pandemics. Overall, these intentions differed in the individual countries. While only 19% of respondents in Sweden wanted to punish politicians for their actions during the pandemic, in Mexico the figure was 49%. It was similar with the desire to punish scientists, which was expressed by 12% (Sweden) to 27% (Italy) of the respondents. Between 6% (Germany) and 15% (Italy) were interested in destroying the entire political system. Between 49% (Japan) and 84% (Mexico) were prepared to comply with regulations in future pandemics.
Distorted memory can prevent preparation for future crises
“The results show that there are systematic differences in how people remember the pandemic, even though their assessments at the time often did not differ that much,” says the second lead author Luca Henkel from the University of Chicago, summarizing the results. The distorted memory leads to a polarized perception of the past, which has the potential to maintain current and future social polarization and hinder preparation for future crises. Cornelia Betsch from the University of Erfurt and the Bernhard Nocht Institute Hamburg adds: “In the future, we will have to look beyond the short-term effects of political measures to contain pandemics and also take long-term consequences for social cohesion into account.”
Further studies will now examine how memory distortion and social polarization influence each other over time and how these dynamics vary in different countries. Other crises such as the climate crisis should also be taken into account. Robert Böhm from the University of Vienna: “We also want to research ways to reduce polarization. It may be possible to reduce the identification of vaccinated and unvaccinated people with their vaccination status. This could reduce the motivation to distort memories in the first place and thus improve the processing of the pandemic.”