This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Napoleon Bonaparte and Bernardo O'Higgins: two 19th-century military leaders renowned to this day in their native countries of France and Chile. Yet, while Napoleon's name and exploits are known throughout the world, O'Higgins remains largely obscure outside his homeland.
This phenomenon demonstrates the distinction between global and local collective memory—the shared knowledge of the past that shapes group identity—and it is the topic of newly published research from Constructor University's Professor Dr. Mariana Macedo together with Dr. Melanie Oyarzun, Professor Dr.
Cristian Candia and Professor Dr. The study, "Cultural proximity reveals a local premium in collective memory," is published this month in the interdisciplinary journal PNAS Nexus. Although constructs like "familiarity" and "salience" have been used in empirical research into collective memory, they often fail to distinguish between local and global forms of fame.
Macedo's latest research focuses on disentangling these two dimensions to better understand how different forms of attention and identity shape what we collectively remember and forget. The study examined more than 50,000 multilingual Wikipedia biographies spanning 137 billion page views and used a gamified online experiment with 41,000 participants to untangle and analyze local and global collective memory. Macedo and her colleagues found that locality is a key factor in collective memory, with participants about 10% more likely to correctly identify famous figures from their own country and 5% more likely to identify people from their same language group.
The study also looked at the impact of three major life events—an Oscar win, a Nobel Prize and death—on collective memory, finding they led to "brief but strong surges" in local prominence, with "slower but sustained increases" in global fame. Now that the full study is available online, we caught up with professor Macedo and her colleagues to discuss the significance of this project. Fame is not just about how many people know someone, but also where they are remembered.
A person can be famous locally, globally, both or neither. Major events, such as winning an Oscar or Nobel Prize, often cause a short rise in local attention, while global attention grows more slowly and lasts longer. After a death, local attention may fade while global interest continues to grow.
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