Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 14: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Dynamics III
SOE 14.7: Talk
Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 15:30–15:45, H44
Emergence of collective memories — Sungmin Lee1 and •Petter Holme1,2 — 1Department of Physics, Umea University, 90187 Umea, Sweden — 2Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440-746, Korea
Causality is intimately linked with understanding. Understanding an event is semantically almost equal to identifying its causes. A causal link is a mental pairing, ordered in time, between two events. Understanding an episode of history is to identify a chain, or web, of such causal relationships. Our mental picture of history, at all levels, takes the form of such directed causal networks. In this work we investigate how people collectively understands history and how communication affects this understanding. As a starting point, we analyzed anthropological data collecting the life stories of 14 villagers in northern China. We characterize the network topology, including a skewed distribution of both in- and out-degree (the number of events leading to another event, and the number of events caused by an event, respectively). We also find cycles (inconsistencies in the aggregate picture of history). We make an agent-based model investigating the stability of collective memories like this data set. This model shows a tendency for disjoint clusters to form, a cluster being defined as a set of agents having a similar mental pictures of history, which echoes observations from cultural groups in conflict with different ways of narrating the same historical episode.