Abstract：
Collective narcissism-a phenomenon in which individuals show excessively high regard for their own group-is ubiquitous in studies of small groups. We examined how Americans from the 50 U.S. states ( N = 2,898) remembered U.S. history by asking them, \"In terms of percentage, what do you think was your home state\'s contribution to the history of the United States?\" The mean state estimates ranged from 9% (Iowa) to 41% (Virginia), with the total contribution for all states equaling 907%, indicating strong collective narcissism. In comparison, ratings provided by nonresidents for states were much lower (but still high). Surprisingly, asking people questions about U.S. history before they made their judgment did not lower estimates. We argue that this ethnocentric bias is due to ego protection, selective memory retrieval processes involving the availability heuristic, and poor statistical reasoning. This study shows that biases that influence individual remembering also influence collective remembering.
摘要：
集体自恋-一种个体对自己的群体表现出过分重视的现象-在小团体的研究中无处不在。我们通过询问来自美国50个州（N=2,898）的美国人如何记住美国历史，“就百分比而言，你认为你的家乡对美国历史的贡献是什么？所有州的总贡献等于907%，表明强烈的集体自恋。相比之下,非居民为各州提供的评级要低得多(但仍然很高)。令人惊讶的是,在人们做出判断之前询问有关美国历史的问题并没有降低估计。我们认为这种以种族为中心的偏见是由于自我保护，涉及可用性启发式的选择性内存检索过程，和糟糕的统计推理。这项研究表明，影响个人记忆的偏见也会影响集体记忆。
