Cultural proximity reveals a local premium in collective memory

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ID: 329284
2026
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Abstract
Abstract Collective memory—shared information about the past that shapes a group’s identity—is often examined through constructs such as familiarity or salience, conflating its local and global components. Here, we untangle these components using multilingual online attention traces for over 50,000 Wikipedia biographies spanning 137 billion pageviews and a large-scale behavioral recognition experiment in which more than 41,000 participants answered factual questions about famous biographies. Our experiment reveals a robust local memory premium, with people being around 10 percentage points more likely to answer correctly questions about someone from their country and about 5 points more likely to answer correctly questions about biographies with whom they share a language. Finally, we study the impact of three major life events: Nobel Prizes, Oscars, and deaths in local and global online attention, finding these events produce brief but strong surges in local attention and slower but sustained increases in global attention. These findings add important spatial and temporal nuances to our understanding of collective memory.
Reference Key
openalex_W7213956214 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Mariana Gomes da Motta Macedo, Melanie Oyarzún, Cristián Candia, César A. Hidalgo
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Journal PNAS nexus
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag308
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag308
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