Social representation of events in world history: crosscultural consensus or Western discourse? How Turkish students view events in world history.

The perceptions of historical events are considered to be an important cultural, political, and social psychological variable. Earlier studies have shown a crosscultural consensus on historical events that are considered to be important. It has been indicated that a strong Western–Christian European template dominates the view of which events are considered to be important events in history, by many samples across the world. It was the aim of this study to test this finding with a Turkish sample, which would represent some unique characteristics in that it is Muslim, comes from an Empire background, and has undergone a recent nation‐building process. College students (n = 372) responded to a questionnaire that was utilized in seven other countries. It was shown that Turkish students were not Eurocentric as expected by the literature: They were highly sociocentric; they gave importance to events related to Turkish history. They were similar to their European counterparts in that war and violence were given primary importance when selecting events as important in history. However, they did not behave as predicted by earlier literature: They did not see Western European events as having a primary importance in history but gave at least equal importance to events that originated from Ottoman Empire roots. The results were discussed in terms of the unique cultural and historical variables that contribute to the identity and social psychological attributions of Turkish students. Further research should focus on not only which events are considered as important historical events but also the reasons behind these.

Les perceptions des événements historiques sont considérées comme une variable culturelle, politique, sociale et psychologique importante. Des études antérieures ont montré un consensus multiculturel à propos des événements historiques qui sont considérés comme importants. Un fort courant européen occidental‐chrétien semble dominer dans l'identification des événements qui sont considérés comme importants dans l'histoire, et ce, pour plusieurs échantillons à travers le monde. Le but de la présente étude était de tester s'il en était de même pour un échantillon turc, lequel possède des caractéristiques uniques liées au fait qu'il est musulman, qu'il vient d'un contexte d'empire et qu'il a récemment entrepris un processus de construction nationale. Trois cent soixante‐douze étudiants collégiens ont répondu à un questionnaire qui a été utilisé dans sept autres pays. Les résultats ont montré que les étudiants turcs n’étaient pas eurocentriques, tel qu'attendu en regard des écrits, qu'ils étaient fortement sociocentriques et qu'ils accordaient de l'importance aux événements reliés à l'histoire de la Turquie. Ils étaient similaires à leurs voisins européens quant au fait d'accorder une importance première à la guerre et à la violence lors de la sélection des événements importants de l'histoire. Cependant, ils ne se sont pas comportés comme attendu en ne percevant pas les événements occidentaux‐européens comme ayant une importance première dans l'histoire, mais ils ont octroyé une importance au moins égale aux événements qui émanaient des racines de l'Empire ottoman. Les résultats ont été discutés dans le cadre des variables culturelles et historiques uniques qui contribuent à l'identité et aux attributions sociales et psychologiques des étudiants turcs. De plus, il a été proposé que la recherche future ne soit pas seulement centrée sur les événements perçus comme plus importants historiquement, mais aussi sur les raisons sous‐jacentes à ces perceptions.

Las percepciones de los eventos históricos son consideradas una variable importante desde el punto de vista cultural, político, y sociopsicológico. Investigaciones anteriores han mostrado un consenso transcultural sobre los eventos históricos que se consideran importantes. Se ha indicado que existe una fuerte tendencia occidental y cristiana europea que domina la perspectiva sobre qué eventos históricos son considerados importantes, con numerosas muestras de diversas partes del mundo. El propósito de este estudio fue poner a prueba este hallazgo con una muestra de Turquía que representa características únicas: es un país musulmán, tiene un trasfondo imperial, y ha pasado por un proceso de reconstrucción nacional en los últimos tiempos. 372 alumnos universitarios respondieron un cuestionario que había sido utilizado en otros siete países. Se observó que los alumnos turcos no eran eurocéntricos como lo anticipan las publicaciones sobre el tema; eran altamente sociocéntricos; le dieron importancia a los eventos relacionados con la historia de Turquía. Al seleccionar los eventos importantes de la historia, mostraron ser similares a sus pares europeos, en que las guerras y la violencia les resultaron de importancia primaria. Sin embargo, no se cumplieron las predicciones de las publicaciones previas, dado que no percibieron los eventos occidentales‐europeos como los más importantes de la historia, aunque le dieron igual importancia a los eventos que tuvieron sus raíces en el imperio otomano. Se analizan los resultados a la luz de las variables culturales históricas únicas que contribuyen a la identidad y las atribuciones sociopsicológicas de los alumnos turcos. Se debate, asimismo, que las investigaciones futuras no deberían enfocarse únicamente en los eventos históricos importantes, sino también en las razones detrás de ellos.

Social perception; Historical events; Cultural differences; Turkish

I am the Sultan of Sultans, the king of Kings, the shadow of Allah on earth … you are only Francois the governor of the French province … [the] King of France has asked for help and that Suleyman will magnificently go to his rescue. (Frazee, [2] , p. 26)

Every Turkish child grows up reading at least once in history textbooks the letter written by Suleyman the Magnificent to the King of France. This is an example of what Liu and Hilton ([10] ) describe as history and national identity being defined by cultural narrative. In 2011, the very same letter was presented to the French president by the Turkish prime minister as a gift, providing an example of how historical narrative may define current political behavior and social psychological perceptions (“Suleyman's letter”, [17] ). Ascribing a meaning to events is a social psychological process. The field of discursive psychology has contributed to our thinking that encoding, remembrance, and imparting of events depend on cultural and familial narratives (Rogers, [14] ). The same is also true for history and historical events. It has been suggested that national identity and “charter” are defined by a group's narrative about its representation of its history (Liu & Hilton, [11] ). Further, Liu and Hilton ([10] ) suggest that both the political actors and the scholars of a community provide group‐based social narratives that distinguish the friends and enemies on which the social group's representations of historical events are based. However, there has been a recent focus on the effects of globalization, mass culture, and the powerful narrative of Western culture (Glowsky, Ellermann, Kromeier, & Andorfer, [4] ). Research suggests that there is a surprising uniformity and Western European bias in terms of remembering historical events. Glowsky et al. ([4] ) reported a global collective convergence from an online survey of 116 countries. Other studies also reported a Eurocentric bias, with an emphasis on war and politics (Liu et al., [10] ). Interestingly, the Malaysian sample, which was the only predominantly Muslim group in Liu and colleagues’ ([10] ) study, revealed the highest level of idiosyncrasy, leading the authors to suggest that it might be interesting to look at “Muslim–Western differences rather than East–West differences” in future research (Liu et al., [10] , p. 179). A later study of the same group (Liu et al., [12] ) reported that relatively high levels of ethnocentricity coexisted with similarities to Western samples in a group of Turkish students. Interestingly, no common trends were observed between Islamic countries.

Using a slightly different method, Pennebaker, Paez, and Deschamps ([13] ) studied the perception of similar historical events by individuals from different cultural backgrounds. When subjects from seven countries rated the 10 most important events of the last 1000, 100, or 10 years, results depicted Eurocentric, violence (high emphasis on violent events), recency, and sociocentric biases. To give an example of the sociocentric bias, high‐power Western nations regarded national events as world events. It is not surprising that a Western–Eurocentric bias was observed in these samples, since all the contributors were from European countries, with the exception of Japan.

The starting point of the present study was an interest in the global consensus on collective memory of historical events from the Turkish perspective. Turkey has a unique cultural, historical, and geopolitical position, and as such may present unexpected findings with respect to Euroecentric bias. Resting geographically on both Asia and Europe, Turkey presents an identity alliance that tends to waver between the two. Historically, the cultural identities it presented ranged from an Islamic empire to a secular republic (Kadioğlu, [8] ). According to Liu and Hilton ([10] ), representation of self and events in a group constructs the nation's identity and defines its “charter.” The Ottoman “charter” was being the “leader of the Muslim world” (Wheatcroft, [19] ), while the Kemalist–modernist era shifted the charter to become secular and Westernized (Walker, [18] ). As Hall ([6] ) aptly discusses, the definition of national, cultural identity has opposition‐based outgroup references in addition to the ingroup properties. It appears that Turkish identity has been defined as a contrast to the Western and European, and always reflected a conflict with the West. There was a paradox in the definition of the new nation state's identity: Although Turkey was to become Westernized, it also fought an independence war against the West. Turkey's paradoxical relationship with the West involved times of admiration and imitation, along with those of denial and criticism of all things European (Canefe & Bora, [1] ). Historiography—the definition of national identity in historical roots—is one of the tools of nation‐building. It has been suggested that history writing was globalized in the last century as nationalization became equated with Westernization (Sachsenmaier, [15] ). Turkey presents a paradoxical example for balancing a distinct national identity with modernization. Hence the historical principle espoused was to embrace “Turkism” through modernization and Westernization (Kadioğlu, 1996; Stone, 2009).

Pennebaker and colleagues ([13] ) argued that a high level of sociocentricity is expected of only high‐powered nations. It is hypothesized in the current study that, although Turkey cannot be considered as being high‐power economically, it may present a sociocentric rather than a Eurocentric bias due to its imperial legacy and national identity discourse. Violence and recency biases are also hypothesized.

The participants in the present study were recruited from either a public (n = 175) or a private (n = 196) university in Istanbul, Turkey. Of the 372 participants, 220 were female and 152 were male. Although this was a sample of convenience, an effort was made to obtain some balance between students enrolled in social sciences (230 students) and engineering (142 students).

Data were collected between February and May 2010. Informed consent was obtained from participants. The questionnaire used was identical to that used by Pennebaker et al. ([13] ). The participants responded to the following questions: “If you were writing a book about the history of the world for the past 1000 years, which three events would you choose as being the most important?” The same question was repeated for the past 100 and past 10 years. Thirty‐four percent of the group received the 1000 year question first, while 66% received the 10 year question first. The word olay was used in the Turkish translation (which was backtranslated by two judges) to correspond exactly to the word “event”.

The most important and complicated task in data analysis was the categorization of responses. Some of the responses that were used by only a very small number of people could nevertheless be subsumed under a category (e.g., team names, soccer, etc., under sports). Utmost effort was given to preserving the original version of responses without altering them. An effort was made to use the same categories as Pennebaker et al. ([13] ). However, several items were unique to the Turkish sample (military coups, independence war, etc.) so they required new categories. There were 3370 valid responses (nine responses per participant). Initially the responses were reduced to 380 broad categories, which in turn were reduced to 77. Three of these categories were not included in the analyses (personal, e.g., my birthday; unclassifiable, e.g., life, human development; and blank).

A final reduction revealed eight general categories: wars and terror; economic changes and events; government and politics; technology and science; social events and change; regional conflict; popular culture; health concerns; and natural disasters. The reduction of categories was undertaken by the principal investigators and two independent raters (university professors) who were asked to group the 77 categories into eight. An event was included in a category in accordance with the majority rating.

The events were also coded for the time period when they took place in an attempt to evaluate the recency hypothesis. Events mentioned by the participants were dated by the researchers based on standard references. Some events could be interpreted in multiple ways with respect to the time frame they refer to. For example, as “the Ottoman Empire” lasted from the 13th century to the 20th, the responses relating to the Ottoman Empire may ambiguously be interpreted to refer to the beginning of the empire or its most powerful era; based on the wording of the participants’ responses the judges categorized the time. The time categories were re‐evaluated by the two researchers and two judges to resolve ambiguity. Events were placed in a time category when a majority decision was reached. Time coding was not possible for some events, such as “religious conflicts, philosophical change.” The six time periods were: 2000 and after; 1950 to 1999; 1900 to 1949; 1600 to 1899; 1599 and before; and uncoded. The frequencies of all 77 categories were calculated to investigate the recency effect.

Of the 3370 total responses given by the participants 310 (9.2%) were blank, 23 (0.69 %) were personal and 51 (1,51%) were unclassifiable. The remaining 77 categories were tallied and their relative frequencies were determined to be rank ordered from the most frequently mentioned to the least. [NaN] presents top 10 events for each time period.

Table 1 Rankings and relative frequencies of most important historical events reported for the past 1000, 100, and 10 years by the Turkish sample ( n  = 372)

In order to evaluate whether a priming effect occurred—that is, whether presentation of the 10 years question as opposed to the 1000 years question first had an effect on the responses of participants—a χ2 analysis of the differences between the two conditions was undertaken. It was observed that the frequencies of events reported in the 100 years question, which was in the middle, did not differ for the two conditions χ2(df = 4, n = 372), = 9.20, p > .05.

Regarding the Eurocentricity hypothesis, only half of the events listed to have occurred in 1000 years were related to Europe in the Turkish sample. For the 100 years question, only the World Wars (three separate items) may be considered to be events related directly to Europe, while two (technology and the nuclear bomb) are more generally Western, leaving four items that are unique to Turkey.

[NaN] presents data collected by Pennebaker et al. ([13] ) from seven countries to be compared with the data collected in the present study. Notice that there is a high degree of consistency between the countries in Pennebaker et al.'s ([13] ) study, all of which put only one or at the most two idiosyncratic events in their top 10 ranked list, while mentioning eight events reported by a different country. Idiosyncratic events are defined as events that are not included in the list of any other country.

Table 2 Most important events in world history in the past 1000 years

1 Adapted from “The social psychology of history” by J. W. Pennebaker, D. Paez, and J. C. Deschamps (2006), Psicologia Politica, 32, p. 20, with permission of authors.

A closer scrutiny of [NaN] reveals that the top three events listed by the seven countries are almost identical, with the exception of Switzerland. In contrast, the 10 events that are rated to be the most important within the past 1000 years by the Turkish sample include five that were not mentioned by subjects from any of the other seven countries.

[NaN] presents the 10 events rated to be the most important within the past 100 years by the Turkish sample, to be compared with those reported by the subjects from seven other countries by Pennebaker et al. ([13] ). The high level of sociocentricity in the Turkish sample is noticeable, as they reported four events unique to Turkish history as opposed to the lack of idiosyncrasy revealed by Pennebaker's subjects.

Table 3 Most important events in world history in the past 100 years

2 Adapted from “The social psychology of history” by J. W. Pennebaker, D. Paez, and J. C. Deschamps (2006), Psicologia Politica, 32, p. 20, with permission from authors.

The data were then evaluated with respect to violence and politics biases. Our data strongly supported both. Of events reported by the participants, 65% were related to war and politics (33% wars and terror, 32% government and politics), whereas as low as 7% were related to economic events and change, 10% to technology and science, 6.8% to social events and change, 2.6% to regional conflicts, 1.5% to popular culture, and 6.7% to health concerns and natural disasters.

Finally, our data did not provide evidence for a recency effect. When asked to evaluate the most important events of the past 1000 years, 32% of events mentioned by the Turkish sample were in the past three centuries, while the remaining 68% occurred earlier. Regarding the 100 years question, only 27% of the reported events occurred during the latter half while 73% of events were in the first half of the century.

There has been a recent focus on crosscultural consensus on the memory of historical events. Research suggests a tendency to ascribe importance to historical events of European origin, especially if they are related to war and violence, and if they occurred relatively recently (Glowsky et al., [4] ; Liu et al., [10] ; Pennebaker et al., [13] ) The purpose of the present study was to test these effects in a Turkish sample. Due to geopolitics of the country, the Islamic emphasis on the people's identity, and the impact of the nation‐building process that characterized the recent history of the republic, we expected the Turkish sample to yield results discrepant from those reported by Pennebaker et al. ([13] ) and Liu et al. ([10] ). Indeed, the Turkish sample differed substantially with respect to its recollection of history compared with the Western (Pennebaker et al., [13] ) or the mixed Western/Eastern samples (Liu et al., [10] , 2009). The number of events unique to Turkish history was higher than the other samples for all the eras. In the 1000 year scenario, three of the top events were unique to Turkish history: the Conquest of Constantinople, Ottoman Empire and Turkish Wars. Furthermore, two of these events were considered to be the most and second most important events in history. While “geographical discoveries” ranked to be fourth, and appears similar to the top‐ranked event mentioned by many other countries as “New World”, it is interesting to note that it was almost always phrased as geographical discoveries and appeared to include a larger array, and at times the responses specified other pathways such as “the Silk Road.” It has been suggested that the history of an empire makes a differential contribution to the historical narrative. Although Turkey today is neither an economic nor a political superpower, the historical narrative about its identity is built on its imperial history (Gellner, [3] ; Walker, [18] ). It has been suggested that a nation's historical narrative contributes to its charter—its identity (Liu & Hilton, [11] ). As was hinted in the opening quote of this article, the historical relationship between Turkey and Europe has always been ambivalent (Canefe & Bora, [1] ; Gürbilek, [5] ). With the modernization movement in the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and the establishment of the secular Turkish republic, Turkey has welcomed a European influence, toward which it also maintained a defensive and arrogant perception (Canefe & Bora, [1] ; Gürbilek, [5] ).

In addition to the cultural empire history, the nation‐building project of the 1920s has assumed a certain perspective in history education. A high level of ethnocentricism and national pride has been highlighted in elementary school textbooks, in which phrases such as “the unquestionably number one state of the world: the Ottomans” or “Fatih the Conquerer who has 17 nations under his patronage” (Kabapınar, [7] , p. 220) frequently appear. As late as 1994 a survey of high school history texts reported that only 5% of each book was apportioned to European history (Koullapis, [9] ).

The same trend was observed for the past 100 years. Four of the most important events were from Turkish history, while for the other countries the number of events unique to their own country was two. Histographically, the modernization and nationalization processes might have taken “Europe” as a reference point in addition to keeping a distinct Turkish perspective on the past.

Consistent with the previous research, violence bias—that is, the tendency for violent and political events to be recollected at a disproportionately high rate—was observed for the Turkish sample as well (Liu et al., [10] , [12] ; Pennebaker et al., [13] ). Events that involved war, violence, and politics were considered to be most important both for 1000 and 100 years scenarios by the Turkish sample.

The present study differed from earlier ones with respect to the recency effect; that is, the tendency to ascribe higher importance to more recent events. The Eurocentric, Western history type of events mentioned by the samples in the other studies were dated from more recent eras, while the Turkish subjects focused on events related to the history of building the Empire (15th century) or the republic (early 20th century) which probably contributed to the failure to observe the recency effect. Hence, the lack of a recency effect might have resulted from the idiosyncratic, sociocentric emphasis of the Turkish sample. Our results differ from those of Liu et al. ([12] ), who reported a strong recency effect using a Turkish sample. However, Liu and colleagues did not use time ranges in their questions about important historical events. So the events that were part of the 100 years list in the present study were top ranked in Liu et al. ([12] ). Regarding the past 10 years, American aggression (including the war in Iraq), terrorism (including September 11 2001), and economic crises were considered important by the Turkish sample. There were only two sociocentric events unique to Turkey in the top 10 ranked list for the past 10 years. It is not possible to compare our results to those of Pennebaker et al. ([13] ) or Liu et al. ([10] ), as they covered different decades.

The findings of the present study appear to challenge the crosscultural consensus on a European bias in terms of historical memory (Liu et al., [10] ; Pennebaker et al., [13] ) or a global collective memory of historical events (Glowsky et al., [4] ). Liu et al. ([12] ) in their later study have moderated their assertion, indicating that representations of world history are “Eurocentric tempered by nationalism” (p. 686). It appears indeed that the collective memory of world history has shared, universal elements (Liu et al., [10] ); however, these may not be as extensive as earlier studies suggested. It is possible that the subjects that participated in earlier studies were mainly from Western nations or from nations that have aligned themselves with a Western ideology (e.g., Pennebaker et al., [13] ). Other studies (Liu et al., [10] , 2009) have attempted to remedy this by including Eastern samples. Still, however, it appears that such broad categorizations may not be appropriate. As Liu and Hilton ([10] ) have aptly described, social representations of past historical events have an important function: They define the identity of a culture, prompt people to act collectively, and define ingroups. In an eloquent article, cultural theorist Stuart Hall ([6] ) discusses the development of the ideas of “West, Europe, and Eurocentricism” and the discourse and power it brings. The present results may need to be considered in this light: It is possible that the “global collective memory” that is being reported in some of the studies, or the crosscultural consensus of meaning attributed to historical events, is a result of just such a discourse. That is, if we only look at countries that have defined themselves as Western (Hall defines this concept as societies that are industrialized, urbanized, capitalized, secular, and modern) or wish to be defined as such, they may be using the discourse and the language of the powerful West, and we may find a Eurocentric, Westernized representation of historical events. However, we should remember that for every ingroup defined, there exists an outgroup/contrast. Turkey is an example. Hall ([6] ) discusses that the very first use of the word “Europeans” was in reference to a victory over Islamic forces. It would be naive to expect the descendents of the Ottomans to now agree with the Western discourse of history. Earlier findings (Liu et al., [10] ; Pennebaker et al., [13] ) may be explained by the fact that they included only subjects from the West or, in Gellner's ([3] ) words, from countries that had chosen to solve the dilemma of being caught behind technological and economic advances by imitating and espousing the values of the West. The present study shows that before we make broad generalizations about crosscultural consensus we need to look at specific cultural factors that contribute to the social identity of cultures and how they may affect the current representations. The present sample reflects a culture that defines itself in opposition to a Western European model, while at the same time espousing modernization values. This paradox is reflected in their representations of history. The fact that Turkey has an imperial history has been suggested as one of the explanations for these findings, and may be tested in further research with other cultures with similar backgrounds. It has been suggested (Walker, [18] ) that an imperial past has a differential effect on the identity of nations: It creates a feeling of superiority, especially when the empire has included neighboring nations. Alternatively, the present results may reflect hegemonic history writing as is often observed during nation‐building processes, which would then suggest that the Turkish sample presents both a nationalistic and a European bias (Sachsenmaeir, [15] ). However, the idea of a global consensus regarding representation of history has not yet been supported sufficiently.

In this study, because we attempted to test whether Pennebaker et al.'s results would be replicated in a Turkish sample, we used the same method as they did. The absence of a further elaboration of responses is a limitation of the current study. Further studies may be necessary to elucidate the meanings ascribed to historical events by different cultures.

Most of the earlier studies as well as the present one have utilized university samples. It would be interesting to evaluate the perceptions of less educated individuals from different cultures, and thus possibly to evaluate the effects of formal education or culture. Furthermore, it would be interesting to look at subgroups in a culture. For example, the issue of identity has not been well studied. In Turkey there are groups of people who primarily identify themselves as “European” while others identify themselves as “Muslim.” It would provide some theoretical clarity to investigate the social representations of these groups in the future.