One of the most legendary players to ever have played the game of professional football (soccer) was Diego Maradona (October 30, 1960 – November 25, 2020). Maradona was a professional Argentinian football player and manager, and a joint winner (along with Pelé) of the FIFA Player of the 20th Century award. The news of Maradona’s recent passing is tragic to football fans around the world, and so we write this post in his honor.
Maradona was arguably most famous for scoring two of the most iconic goals in the history of professional football: “The Hand of God” and the “Goal of the Century” (see video below).
These two sensational goals are likely to live on in our collective memories of the FIFA World Cup, the most widely viewed sporting event. From a cognitive science perspective, our memories of these events point to an interesting area of inquiry: The formation and structure of collective memories.
Collective memory refers to a shared representation of a past event by a particular group of people. Collective memories can be formally acquired, such as in school and tutorial settings (e.g., learning the order of U.S. presidents in a class) or they can be informally acquired, such as through a shared experience (e.g., watching the FIFA World Cup). Although much is known about formally learned collective memories, it is less clear the commonalities they share with informally acquired collective memories.
To address this, in a study published in one of the Psychonomic Society’s journals, Memory & Cognition, researchers Luz Bavassi, Laura Kaczer, and Rodrigo Fernandez sought to characterize and understand common attributes of informal collective memories. Using the FIFA World Cup as a case study, the researchers sought to evaluate informal collective memories relative to known findings for formal collective memories and memory in general.
In their study, a group of Argentinian participants completed a survey based on their common knowledge and memories of each FIFA World Cup tournament from 1930 (the first tournament) to 2014 (the 20th tournament). Participants were first asked to rate their general interest in football (soccer). After, they were asked a series of questions regarding each FIFA World Cup Championship: Which country was the winner?
- Which country was the runner-up?
- Which country was the host?
- How confident are you in your three memory responses?
- Rank the emotional value of this championship.
- Provide specific keywords for this championship.
The researchers hypothesized that people’s knowledge for the World Cup championship could reflect a robust informal collective memory, and thus, might share properties with more formal collective memories.
The results of this investigation were interesting and consistent with several classic memory findings (see figure below). Here we point out a few.
First, detail accuracy was relatively high for the first tournament and the more recent tournaments, compared to others that fell in the middle. This finding is known as the serial position effect where items at the beginning (primacy) and items at the end (recency) of a list are better remembered than items that fall in the middle of the list. In addition, memory accuracy spiked for the 1950 championship, where a highly surprising victory occurred. The finding of greater accuracy for salient events is known as the distinctiveness effect, where items on a list that stand out from the others are better remembered. Lastly, and in line with the distinctiveness effect, participants showed greater memory for tournaments where Argentina were the champions. Given that all participants in the study were Argentinian, those particular tournaments would be relatively distinct.
Moreover, greater memory accuracy and detail were positively correlated with interest in football. That is, participants who denoted a strong interest in football were more accurate in recalling the tournaments as well as providing keywords related to the tournaments.
Taken together, the pattern of results for informal collective memories related to the FIFA World Cup demonstrates that informal collective memories can be robust and mirror common attributes of more formal collective memories, such as those obtained in formal learning settings.
We are forever grateful to Diego Maradona for the strong informal collective memories we all share of one of the greatest sports in the world!
Featured Psychonomic Society article:
Bavassi, L., Kaczer, L., Fernandez, R.S. (2020). Maradona in our minds: The FIFA World Cup as a way to address collective memory properties. Memory & Cognition, DOI 10.3758/s13421-019-00983-9.