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Article Excerpt
Do you know the colour of Adolf Hitler's hair (brown or black)? Do you find it hard to imagine Winston Churchill in a colourful suit? Do you think of concentration camps as grey environments? Do you picture the Second World War as an episode in which the weather was primarily gloomy? Questions like these may illustrate that for most of us who did not witness the Second World War first hand, it is quite difficult to think of World War II (WWII) in a clear, vivid, and colourful manner. Our mental representation of WWII seems rather unclear, fuzzy, gloomy and grey, which is possibly due to the fact that much of the authentic photo and film footage of that era is in black and white and of poor quality. Admittedly, in recent years, there have been motion pictures about WWII that are strikingly realistic (e.g. Spielberg's 1998 Saving Private Ryan). However, documentaries about WWII typically rely on authentic materials, and hence, the average TV viewer is probably exposed to a substantial amount of poor quality (primarily black and white) film footage. Two of the hypotheses tested in the experiments presented here are that people indeed have relatively unclear mental representations of WWII, and that this lack of clarity is caused by viewing authentic WWII film footage.
According to the source monitoring framework, clarity (defined by brightness, vividness, detailedness, and colourfulness) is an important criterion for the discrimination between memories of real events and fantasies (Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988; Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). That is, real events are represented in a more clear, bright, vivid, detailed, and colourful fashion than fantasies. When deciding on the reality of a mental representation, people appear to apply criteria like these subconsciously. Hence, unclear imagery is likely to be considered a fantasy, whereas clear mental images are likely to be judged as memories of real events (see Destun & Kuiper, 1999; Dobson & Markham, 1993; Rassin, Merckelbach, & Spaan, 2001; Suengas & Johnson, 1988).
Combining the assumption that many people have unclear mental images of WWII and the notion from cognitive psychology literature that unclear imagery is associated with unreality results in a somewhat paradoxical hypothesis. That is, individuals who have trouble producing a clear mental image of WWII may be tempted to judge specific WWII events to be unreal. Put simply events that are hard to imagine (e.g. the systematic murder of millions of Jews) run the risk of not being believed to be true.
In sum, the following hypotheses were addressed in the present experiments: (1) people's mental imagery of WWII lacks clarity (Experiments 1 and 3); (2) this lack of clarity is caused by viewing authentic film footage which generally lacks clarity (Experiment 4); and (3) the lack of clarity of WWII imagery is associated with disbelieving specific WWII events (or 'Holocaust denial'; Experiments 2, 3, and 4).
EXPERIMENT 1: MENTAL IMAGES OF DIFFERENT ERAS
In this experiment, the idea that mental representations of WWII are relatively unclear was investigated. Participants were instructed to imagine a WWII scene and subsequently completed a questionnaire pertaining to the characteristics of their imagination. In order to explore whether lack of clarity is specifically pertaining to imagery associated with the first half of the twentieth century, and not with past eras in general, the WWII images were compared with images of a medieval scene. It was hypothesized that WWII imagery would be less clear than medieval imagery.
Method
Participants
Participants in this experiment were 40 undergraduates (33 women). The mean age in this sample was 20.93 years (SD = 4.41). Participants were randomly assigned to the WWII or the medieval condition (both groups N = 20). There were no age, t(38) < 1.0 or gender, [chi square](1) = 1.56, p = .20, differences between the two groups. All participants were tested individually, and received a small financial compensation or course credits.
Procedure
Participants in the WWII condition were given the following instructions: 'Close your eyes, and imagine yourself in the following scene. It is WWII. You are in a part of town that has been hit by bombs and other projectiles. Very recently, a fight between German and allied soldiers took place here. Ahead, there is a...
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