Role of agency in social representations of history
János László
Réka Ferenczhalmy
Katalin Szalai
(Institute of Psychology of the University of Pécs)
Abstract
The paper discusses the relevance of social representations of history from the perspective of collective identity. It argues for content anayzing verbal accounts by computer programs which are sensitive to linguistic forms of psychological features. It presents a program mapping two features of agency, i.e., activity and intentionality. The authors used this program in a study with two text corpora: Hungarian history school books and folk narratives about the salient positive and negative Hungarian historical events. The stories about the Hungarian history, both the professional ones, which are parts of history textbooks, and the stories of the naive historians, present identification patterns in which Hungarians – apart from events in the distant past – appear with reduced capacity of action as compared to other nations. Low level of agency may weaken their responsibility for their fate and the realistic appraisal of their current situation. Contemporary history text books seem to alleviate this identity construction, but their impact on the common forms of collective memory is still in question.
Keywords: history, narrative, social representations, ageny, Hungarian national identity
Social representations theory (Moscovici, 1961, 1973, 1984) embraces the processes by which phenomena in the physical and social environment become objects of social thought. History is a particular set of social representations and representing history deserves particular attention. As Moscovici (1984, p. 10) writes “Social and intellectual activity is, after all, a rehearsal or recital, yet most socio-psychologists mistakenly treats it as if it were amnestic. Our past experiences and ideas are not dead experiences or dead ideas, but continue to be active, to change, and to infiltrate our present experience and ideas.” Or as Liu and Hilton (2005) convincingly show, “the past weighs on the present”. Historical representations function as social theories in frame of which inter-group attitudes, evaluations, prejudices and social judgments are shaped (Hilton, Erb, Dermot, Molian, 199,;Liu, Wilson, MacClure, Higgins,1999, Sibley and Liu. in press).
Historical representations have two highly neglected features. 1. They are intimately bound to group identity. 2. They are narratively organized.
The relationship between representation of national history and national identity has been neglected for two reasons. On the one hand, the two most competent areas in which the phenomenon has been studied intensively, social representations theory (Moscovici, 1984) and social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981) have developed independently of each other; and on the other, narrative meta-theories (Bruner, 1986; Sarbin, 1986), have previously had relatively little influence on theorizing in social psychology. At present, however, there are several theoretical endeavors to integrate social representations theory and social identity theory. The general idea that representations existing in groups by necessity fulfill some sort of an identity function is increasingly gaining ground (Breakwell, 1993; de Rosa, 1996; Elajabarieta, 1994; Vala, 1992). Starting out from omnipresent narrative discourse (Halbwachs, 1925; Barthes, 1966; Bahtyin, 1981) and the idea that human thinking takes place in a narrative mode (Bruner, 1986), there emerges a narrative view of social representations (Flick, 1995; Jovchelovitch, 1996; 2006; László, 1997; 2003, 2008). This integrated approach argues that stories about history are suitable for the study of national identity in social psychology (Liu and László, 2007).
Although there is consensus in very different ethnic groups as to what can and should be told of the history of a group, which events and persons are important from the point of view of a nation’s history (Liu, Wilson, McClure and Higgins, 1999; László, Ehmann and Imre, 2002) and the same can be observed in world history too (Liu, Goldstein-Hawes, Hilton, Huang, Gastardo-Conaco, Dresler-Hawke, Pittolo, Hong, Ward, Abraham, Kashima, Kashima, Ohashi, Yuki, and Hidaka, 2005; Pennebaker, Rimé and Paez, 2001), the meaning of each event, their relevance for the present and the future may be viewed differently by various social groups, and the construction of national identity often takes place in the crossfire of debates. The social representation of events is largely determined by group interests and knowledge about a particular event. Accordingly, we can distinguish polemic (competing social representations of different social groups), emancipated (social representations that fit on the basis of a few criteria) and hegemonic representations (unified social representations widely accepted in a society, see Moscovici, 1988).
Although there is consensus in very different ethnic groups as to what can and should be told of the history of a group, which events and persons are important from the point of view of a nation’s history (Liu, Wilson, McClure and Higgins, 1999; László, Ehmann and Imre, 2002) and the same can be observed in world history too (Liu, Goldstein-Hawes, Hilton, Huang, Gastardo-Conaco, Dresler-Hawke, Pittolo, Hong, Ward, Abraham, Kashima, Kashima, Ohashi, Yuki, and Hidaka, 2005; Pennebaker, Rimé and Paez, 2001), the meaning of each event, their relevance for the present and the future may be viewed differently by various social groups, and the construction of national identity often takes place in the crossfire of debates. The social representation of events is largely determined by group interests and knowledge about a particular event. Accordingly, we can distinguish polemic (competing social representations of different social groups), emancipated (social representations that fit on the basis of a few criteria) and hegemonic representations (unified social representations widely accepted in a society, see Moscovici, 1988).
The social representations maintained in the present time of a society are not static but dynamic entities that change in accordance with the changing demands of the present. This is especially true of representations concerning negative historical events that are characterized by a special kind of dynamism. Approximately 80-90 years are needed for a generation to get sufficiently far from a traumatic event emotionally and temporally so that it can deal with such an event properly. The results of research on the Spanish civil war show that groups with different political views have different (polemic) representations concerning the civil war. However, these representations tend to converge by the third generation; polemic representations turn into hegemonic representations (Paez, Valencia, Marques, Vincze, 2004).
Historical narrative and identity
The “affordances” of historical events, that is, the symbolic contents and emotive qualities of identification potentially expressed by them, identity policy and the real identity needs of society collectively determine the present representations of history.
The classic example of narrative restructuring is the revival of the history of the Masada fortress at the time of the foundation of the Israeli state. In 72-73 BC the Romans stormed the Masada fortress defended by the Jews. The Jews defended their fortress heroically for several months, and when they saw that they had no chance left against the superior power of the enemy, they committed group suicide in order to avoid being captured. This event had been dormant in the historical memory of Jews for a long time, but when the State of Israel was founded in 1948, the founding fathers made it the cornerstone of Jewish history. This conscious step of identity policy was also motivated by a social psychological need to restore the self-esteem of the Jewish nation that had become a victim of the holocaust, in other words, to ensure that Jews could identify with the idea of active resistance and heroism. This interpretation is confirmed by simple facts like the erection of the monument commemorating the Masada incident took place much earlier than the erection of the first Israeli holocaust monument (Zerubavel, 1994; Klar, 2004).
Not only selection of the historical events, but also shaping them by various means of narration, i.e. how the story is told, serves identity needs of a nation. Just as life narrative reveals individual identity, its stability, continuity, strength, complexity, integration, emotion-regulation, etc, historical narratives are informative about the same aspects of national identity. And similar to the automated content analysis applied to narrative categories of individual life stories, which helped to enlighten important aspects of individual identities (László, 2008), narrative psychological content analysis of stories of the national past seems to be able to explore all the social representations – symbolic constructions – that mark the place and role of a group in the world, and may also be able to give an outline of the emotive structure of group identity in a clear way.
Agency
Agency is a major category in narrative construction. In the same time, it is one of the basic dimensions underlying judgments of self, persons and groups. It refers to task functioning and goal achievement, and involves qualities like efficient, competent, active, persistent, and energetic (Wojciszke and Abele, 2008). Agency has a wide range of psychological forms, e.g. capacity, expansion, power, dominancy, separation and independence. Harter (1978) defines the desire to control our environment or have effect on it as effectance motivation. Deci (1975) attributes inner control of actions to intrinsic motivation. Definition of DeCharms (1968) holds personal causation to be human disposition, which means intentional action for the sake of change. The above-mentioned psychological phenomena, all refer to the intention and desire to shape our physical and social environment. Bandura’s (1989, 1994) definition of self-efficacy, or personal efficacy means the belief or idea that individuals are able to achieve the proposed aims and can keep their control on the actions happening in their life. In fact, it means belief in ourselves. The expectations of individuals about their own efficacy have a relationship with their coping: our belief in our own efficacy inspires us to invest more effort to achieve our aims and in a stress situation we fell less press or discomfort. Yamaguchi (2003) correlates control, personal efficacy and the psychological construct of autonomy: successful direct personal control leads to self-efficacy, which is the base of the feeling of autonomy.
Not only individuals but also groups are seen as agents- as they are capable to perform goal-directed behavior and have an effect on their environment. Hamilton (2007) distinguishes between two approaches to agency in group-perception research: one of them conceives agency as the capacity of efficient action (Abelson, Dasgupta, Park & Banaji 1998; Brewer, Hong & Li, 2004), the other one emphasizes the function of the mental states (Morris, Menon & Ames, 2001). The perception of a group’s agency was measured by Spencer-Rogers, Hamilton and Sherman (2007) with four items: the group is ’able to influence others’; is ’able to achieve its goals’ , is ’able to act collectively’ and is ’able to make things happen (produce outcomes)’. Kashima (2005) assessed perceptions of agency with nine items mapping mental states (beliefs, desires and intentions) which, according to him, are the base of the group-agency.
Agency and identity
At least in Western cultures, agency is an important component of personal and social identity. In order to arrive at a well organized and adaptive adult identity, people have to acquire autonomy, which is reflected in their agency in life events (McAdams, 2001). Current narrative models of identity reconstruct personal identity from life stories (Bamberg and Andrews, 2004; Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001; Freeman, 1993; McAdams, 1985) Similar to individual identity, group identity can also be reconstructed from narratives about the group’s past. Representations of history reflect psychological characteristics of national identity such as stability or vulnerability, strength or weakness, autonomy or dependency, etc. (László, 2008; Liu and László, 2007). Distribution of agency between in-group and out-group seems to be a sensitive indicator for the above identity states.
Linguistic markers of agency
Narrative language has the capacity to present characters’ agency in narratives in different forms. Agency can be best expressed by voice. Active voice e.g. “Hungarians occupied their land” carries higher level agency than passive voice: “The land was occupied by Hungarians”. In languages, where passive voice is seldom or not at all used, general subjects instead of nouns or personal pronouns may express passivity.
Another mean of communicating agency is thematization. It shows who is the focal character in the event presented by the text. The theme is presented first in sentences, it has the grammatical role of surface subject and therefore it frequently associated with passive verbs. In “John greeted Mary” the theme is John, however in “Mary was greeted by John” the theme is Mary. Although languages may differ in how thematization is performed, thematic information universally occupies the initial position in sentences (Semin, 2000). Turnbull (1994) showed that the thematic character carried higher responsibility for moral events, therefore her agency is also perceived higher.
There is, however a third mean, which is less connected to grammatical structures than to implicit semantics of verbs (see e.g. Brown and Fish, 1983). Similar to implicit causality, verbs have an implicit activity versus passivity meaning. Build, construct or fight involve high level of activity whereas suffer, lay or listen arise associations of passivity.
Finally, in accord with Kashima (2005), certain transformations of verbs which express intentions and desires also carry agency. Those actors (or group of actors), to whom during the narration of a story we assign numerous intentions, are perceived as capable of acting in order to reach given goals, contrary to those who are attributed few intentions but plenty of constraints. While examining intention, constraint and possibility, the context of action becomes comprehensible, possibly playing role in the evaluation and attribution of such dimensions as control, responsibility and efficiency, which are in turn significant in the evaluation of the acts and story of an individual or a group. Similarly, high intention level and low constraint level in self-narratives or group narratives indicate stable, well-organized and autonomous identity.
The analytic device
In accord with Abelson, Dasgupta, Park and Banaji (1998); and Brewer, Hong, and Li,. (2004), who derive agency from effective actions, a computer algorithm was constructed, which maps active and passive verbs in texts. The program has been developed in NooJ, an integrated linguistic development environment (Silberstein, 2008). This software enables morpho-syntactic, that is textual level analysis. Beyond the elaboration of the content relevant dictionaries for the examination, also the identification of grammatical structures is enabled with the help of local grammars, both for general (e.g. verb + infinitive) and for concrete cases (e.g. any form of the verb to go + infinitive). Consequently, not only concrete words can be searched for, but also word forms and various text environments, which are important for meaning. For isolating languages, such as English, it suffices to compile a dictionary. However, In agglutinative languages, such as Hungarian, different word forms cannot be handled by lexicons. Morphological complexity prevents using simple dictionaries. For this reason, not only words but also grammatical relations between them should be analyzed. NooJ has the capacity for building local grammars around words. Local grammars are able to find and equip the different cases and inflections of the verbs with appropriate output.
The core of the program is an active-passive dictionary. Five judges classified the dictionary of the ten thousand most often-used verbs into different verb categories. A verb was considered active, when it referred to an intentional act, the action had an agent, and the action had an effect on the environment.
“The Hungarian troops occupied Bácska, the Baranya triangle and Muraköz.”
“Rákóczi turned to the French king for help.”
“Hungary took a hand in redeeming the debts of the empire.”
“He chose suicide 3 April in 1941.”
Verbs indicating change in state or action were classified as passive verbs. These actions refer to change outside individual’s control, e.g., changes in physical circumstances, or transcendental changes. For instance:
“Later, the centres of immigration grew up in Paris and London.”
“By 1917 revolts and escapes occurred in the military.”
“On account of these, our country got under totally new life conditions.”
“Thirty percentages of the Hungarian habitants, so 3.3 million Hungarian people, became under control of other states.”
In the next step, local grammars were constructed for contextual disambiguation of verbs whenever it was necessary. The graph of activity-passivity consists of local grammars of 941 active and 230 passive verbs.
The algorithm is able to detect linguistic structures of activity-passivity in text, and thereby enables quantitative analysis of each character’s activity. The higher is the activity-passivity ratio, or in other word, the more active idioms are used at the expense of the passive ones, the higher extent is the character presented as efficient actor in the narrated events and the more is she having effect on her environment. Moreover, the more passive expressions the narrative uses at the expense of the passive ones for a character, the more it emphasizes her passivity, and her incapacity in action.
Intentionality-constraint algorithm. Intentionality can be expressed not only by intentional auxiliary verbs such as want, will, wish, etc., but also by intentional nouns, adverbs, adjectives and postpositions, as well as by some cases of conditional mood and subordinate sentences. Similarly, constraint also has a wide range of lexical and grammatical expressions. Similar to the activity-passivity algorithm, local grammars have been constructed to map all linguistic features of intention and constraint.
Assumptions
When perceiving linguistically presented activity-passivity, intention, and constraint, the context of action becomes comprehensible. Therefore these features play a role in the evaluation and attribution of such dimensions as control, responsibility and efficiency, which are in turn significant in the evaluation of the acts in the story of an individual or a group. Those actors (or group of actors), to whom are assigned high level of activity and numerous intentions in a story, are perceived as capable of acting in order to reach given goals, contrary to those who are attributed few intentions but much constraints. In the way around, high activity and intention level and low constraint level in self-narratives or group narratives indicate stable, well-organized and autonomous identity. In the narration of traumatic events, higher level of activity and intention attributed to in-group can be seen as indicator of elaboration.
Method
The present research focuses on the narration of the ten most important historical events of Hungary (Table 1). The study was carried out on two text corpora. One contains the current primary and secondary school history books’ contents related to these events – composed of approximately 150 thousand words altogether. The other is a folk-historical narrative corpus, gathered from a stratified sample (considering gender, age, level of education, ethnical background). It has been taken from 500 people. It includes two thousand stories, about the same ten historical events (approximately 64 thousand words).
Texts in both corpora were analyzed by the activity-passivity and intentionality-constraint algorithms. Frequencies of hits were subsumed so as to get agency indices for both Hungarian in-group and various out-groups in each event. Frequencies of activity was divided by passivity as well as intentions were divided by constraint. The overall agency index was calculated by averaging the two ratios.
Results
Overall results are shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Without any statistical analysis it is seen that agency of the Hungarian in-group is much lower than the agency attributed to out-groups. The pattern of results is very similar in the history school textbooks and folk-narratives. Apart from some positive events (but not all!) such as conquest of land, establishing the state, victorious phases of freedom fights, and system’s change, Hungarian characters and Hungarians as a group are depicted as less active, less intentional, and having more constraints than their out-groups. Folk-narratives express this pattern more markedly than school books do. Whereas textbooks assign the most agency to out-groups who conquested Hungary in the distant past (Mongolians, Turks), folk-narratives see those out-groups most agentic, who took part in the Hungarian history in the past century, i.e. in WW 1, WW 2, Holocaust and ’56 revolution. Similarly, these are the historical events, where folk-narratives depict Hungarians as having minimal or no agency.
Figure 1. In-group and out-group agency in history text-books
Figure 2. In-group and out-group agency in folk-narratives
Figure 3 and Figure 4 show these discrepancies in bar graph form. Folk-narratives tend to depict both in-group and our-groups as having more agency than textbooks do, except the Hungarian in-group in the negative events, where the agency level is extremely low.
Figure 3. In-group and out-group agency in positive versus negative historical events as presented by history text-books
Figure 4. In-group and out-group agency in positive versus negative historical events as presented by folk-narratives
Discussion
What inferences can be made regarding Hungarian national identity on the basis of these results? Although it is a well-known self serving bias in attribution research that success or victory is attributed to internal, whereas failure or defeat to external causes (see e.g., Forgas, 1985), the degree of this bias as it appears particularly in folk-narratives is remarkable. In negative historical events Hungarians are depicted as not playing active roles, not having intentions, and facing only constraints. In these events out-groups are seen as highly intentional and active. This pattern of results is the most salient with the Paris peace treaty subsequent to WW1. Several historical accounts argue that the Paris peace treaty (Trianon treaty) has been a traumatic experience for the Hungarian national identity after the WW 1 and this trauma persists even today (Romsics 2001, Ormos 1983). The fact that both history text books and folk-narratives depict Hungarians in this event as helpless and defenseless underpins this interpretation. Extremely low level of agency in negative events suggest that both history textbooks and folk-narratives pass on vulnerability and instability of the Hungarian national identity. In the same way, the low level of in-group activity and intentions as opposed to the extremely high level of out-group agency in the most traumatic event of the 20th century suggest that elaboration of this trauma has not progressed too far. There are, however, two positive features for the Hungarian national identity in our results. First, the above tendencies are less expressed in school books than in folk-narratives. Whereas in communicative forms of collective memory (Assmann, 1992), i.e. in folk-narratives Hungarians turn out to be at the mercy of the invasions of greater empires, history text books, when transposing these events into the cultural memory, endow Hungarians with relatively more agency. It suggests that elaboration of the national traumas has still began, at least on the level of historiography. Second, in-group agency relative to out-group agency increases in the events of the recent past whether negative (’56 revolution) or positive (system’s change). This results suggests again a stabilization of national identity. Nevertheless, this process is very slow. Historians claim that several generations of Hungarians have grown up with the feeling that they cannot have effect on their fate and they are not responsible for their life. They have not got used to the independence and the frames of democracy (Ormos, 2005). Our results concerning the system’s change support this observation. Although out-group agency in these texts is relatively low, the in-group is the lowest among the positive events both in the folk-narratives as well as in the stories of the textbooks. This result shows that this important event, which could have represented as an achievement and thereby serving a reintegration of Hungarian national identity, is represented by Hungarian people as an event out of their efficacy or control.
Summing up, we can say that the stories about the Hungarian history, both the professional ones, which are parts of history textbooks, and the stories of the naive historians, present identification patterns in which Hungarians –apart from events in the distant past– appear with reduced capacity of action as compared to other nations. Low level of agency may weaken their responsibility for their fate and the realistic appraisal of their current situation. Contemporary history text books seem to alleviate this identity construction, but their impact on the common forms of collective memory is still in question.
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