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Lead Section

Context/ History of Concept

Theory and/or experimental evidence

Reception/implications

Social cryptomnesia
Social cryptomnesia is a cognitive bias experienced by whole cultures following social change. Cryptomnesia is a failing of memory, usually referring to the mistaken belief that something the individual remembers is actually an original idea. Specifically within social psychology, the term social crytomnesia refers to a social pathology that involves forgetting that a majority idea was once a minority idea. Social cryptomnesia is a failure to remember the origin of a change, in which people know that a change has occurred in society, but forget how this change occurred; that is, the steps that were taken to bring this change about, and who took these steps. This may lead to reduced social credit towards the minorities who made major sacrifices that led to the change in societal values. Social cryptomnesia is an extension of Moscovici's (1985) four stages of minority influence.

Social cryptomnesia is characterized by two components, a successful minority is not visible in the attitudinal field because there is a consensus on its position. because the majority has dissociated the minority origin from the contents of the message, the majority continues to stigmatize this minority. Then dissociation which is the only way for people to accept the message without accepting the minority negative attributes at the identity level.

Historical example: Women's rights
Because of the phenomenon of social cryptomnesia the social role of feminists and the progress that they have made towards equality is not recognized. Feminist groups are then labeled with negative attributes, which end up having the effect of maintaining these minority groups instead of helping them grow, which hinders any further progress towards men and women equality.

The progress made in the first wave of feminism includes but is not limited to: healthcare, education, and the right to vote. These rights are considered to be just by the general population, yet the actions taken by the suffragettes (and suffragists) to get to this point are frequently ignored. Feminists are sometimes subject to negative stereotypes, and sometimes seen as extremists or radical. Furthermore, such negative stereotypes may prevent social change from occurring, even when people agree it is necessary. It may be possible to reduce these negative effects of social cryptomnesia by making individuals aware of how social cryptomnesia may contribute to their biases.

Experimental Evidence
For the first time in 1989, the social cryptomnesia phenomenon had been illustrated by Mugny and Perez. One-third of the participants in their study were asked to rate their attitude towards five normative principles in our democratic society: liberty, equality between genders, equality among ethnic groups, respect for the environment and peace. Another third of the participants were asked to rate their attitudes towards the groups who traditionally fought for these principles: (1) liberty was promoted by anarchists, (2) equality between genders by feminists, (3) equality among ethnic groups by antiracists, (4) respect for the environment by ecologists and (5) peace by pacifists. The last third of the participants simply rated their attitudes towards the five groups, with no reference to the five principles. The results showed that the participants who rated only the minority groups were the ones who showed the least favorable attitudes. Participants who rated the five principles alone clearly approved them; those who rated the values with their associated minority group approved them significantly less. In the third and final group of the study they had exhibited the cryptomnesia process.

Conscientization of Social Cryptomnesia
Conscientization is a teaching technique which focuses on perceiving social and political contradictions in order to elicit some form of attitude change. If social cryptomnesia is produced by dissociation between the message and the source, then conscientization can be induced by “reassociation.” In 2009 Vernet, Vala, Amâncio, & Butera conducted a study in Lisbon. Participants were asked to fill out a series of three questionnaires, they presented it as a study on people’s attitudes toward some currently relevant social issues. The presentation of the questionnaire was purposefully imprecise in order to avoid suspicion that the experimenter was in fact interested in the link between the questions about women’s rights and feminism. When the participants completed the three questionnaires, they were thoroughly debriefed, focusing on ensuring that they understood that the conscientization procedure was an experimental manipulation and that they were not troubled by guilty feelings.