The student campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College at Oxford University failed. One may speculate about the true reasons behind the staunch resistance by this institution against the students’ protest. In the official defence of this choice, something no one can object to was called upon: freedom of speech. Both Chris Patten and Mary Beard argued in favour of keeping the statue because removing statues of individuals with whose views one disagrees is contrary to freedom of speech and historical accuracy.

However, there is nothing free and open about the contribution of these statues to our discourse on British History. In fact, monuments make us forget more than they help us remember. By prompting some thoughts, statues suppress others, thus promoting an ideological view of the past. Seeing figurative public art every day subtly manipulates our minds.

Surely, I hear you say, this is preposterous! Statues are not a means of mind control.

Perhaps not, but consider the following. Psychologists have established the existence of a phenomenon known as socially-shared retrieval-induced forgetting (hereafter, SS-RIF). Let me explain first how retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) works in the lab before describing how it can be socially shared in the wild, so to speak.

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"By prompting some thoughts, statues suppress others, thus promoting an ideological view of the past." 

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Subjects are given pieces of paper with pairs of words. One is a word for a category of things such as ‘animal’ or ‘vegetable’. The other is an exemplar within the category such as ‘dog’ and ‘spinach’. Thus, for instance, participants have many pairs like ‘animal-dog’, ‘animal-cat’, ‘vegetable-spinach’, ‘vegetable-broccoli’ and so forth. Subsequently, they practice remembering (retrieving) some pairs using cues such as ‘animal-d….’ which they must complete. Subjects are only given cues about some pairings and only within one category: ‘animal’ for instance. Finally, participants are tested to see how many pairings they remember. Unsurprisingly, what they remember best are the pairs that they practiced because of the cues.

However, what they remember second best are those pairs that belong to the category that they did not practice at all. Finally, their memory is worst for pairings that were not practiced but belong to the practiced category. The act of remembering some objects actually inhibits memory of related things which therefore become harder to remember, whilst leaving memories for unrelated topics unaffected.

RIF can be socially shared. It operates in the process that shapes the formation of shared memories of one’s past. For example, couples in long term relationships often reminisce about their lives together. Partners recollect some events but not others; they misremember some things and ignore aspects of others. In doing so, they fabricate some details but they also non-consciously inhibit memories of some aspects of the events they recollected. Through repetition some memories are facilitated and others suppressed until over time their memories of their shared past converge onto one shared narrative remembered by both.

Imagine, for example, that two people are reminiscing about their first holiday together. One person reminds the other that it was raining when they arrived at their destination; the other perhaps thought it had been sunny but gets convinced of the opposite. The first then prompts the other to remember that the lift in the hotel did not work. Prompted in this way, the other agrees and adds that the food was bad.

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"If one person does most of the talking, it is what he or she chooses to remember that determines what is forgotten because it is inhibited by the retrieval of some memories." 

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