At the 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama jokingly relied on an "angry Black man" alter ego to express his frustration without endorsing the angry Black man stereotype himself. Similarly, Saturday Night Live made fun of the clear gender dynamics surrounding anger expression during the 2015 Democratic Party primary debates by depicting Bernie

Throughout much of the 20th century, psychologists have largely examined mnemonic processes through an individualistic lens at the expense of social influences.However, this perspective began to change toward the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, when psychologists began to better appreciate the social nature of remembering. In the present paper, we focus on a relatively recent and important evolution of this line of research: the emergence of a psychological approach to collective memory. Using an epidemiological approach to collective memory, we attempt to distil the extant and relevant psychological research and focus on how (collective) memories transmit, converge, and remain stable over time while considering the bidirectional relationship between collective memory and a mnemonic community's identity. We conclude with a discussion of research areas that psychologists should examine moving forward, which will ultimately provide a more holistic understanding of how collective memories emerge, remain stable, and/or change over time.

Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon—socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting—helps explain the mnemonic consequences associated with political speeches, in this case, the Belgian King’s 2012 summer speech. To this end, we analyzed the responses of 43 French speakers and 49 Dutch speakers. Of these individuals, 35 attended to the speech (16 French speakers; 19 Dutch speakers). Our results suggest that the Belgian King’s speech induced French-speaking Belgians who attended the speech to recall less information related to what the King mentioned in the speech. We found no such deficit for Dutch-speaking Belgians. Rather, the Dutch-speaking Belgians exhibited a trend toward greater recall of related and unrelated information when attending relative to not attending to the speach. These results bolster the importance of including a psychological approach in the study of collective memories and the moderating role of social identity.