The news is American but our memories are … Chinese?

What is it about?

Are our memories of the world well described by the international news coverage in our country? If so, sources central to international news may also be central to international recall patterns; in particular, they may reflect an American-centric focus, given the previously proposed central U.S. position in the news marketplace. We asked people of four different nationalities (China, Israel, Switzerland, and the United States) to list all the countries they could name. We also constructed a network representation of the world for each nation based on the co-occurrence pattern of countries in the news. To compare news and memories, we developed a computational model that predicts the recall order of countries based on the news networks. Consistent with previous reports, the U.S. news was central to the news networks overall. However, although national recall patterns reflected their corresponding national news sources, the Chinese news was substantially better than other national news sources at predicting both individual and aggregate memories across nations. Our results suggest that news and memories are related but may also reflect biases in the way information is transferred to long-term memory, potentially biased against the transient coverage of more “free” presses. We discuss possible explanations for this “Chinese news effect” in relation to prominent cognitive and communications theories.

Featured Image