The False Polarization of Heroes: How Social Sorting Affects Collective Memory

Iconic historical figures are meant to represent a society’s most enduring and universal values. And yet, across partisan and sociodemographic groups Americans believe their most important values are widely contested rather than shared. Whether these perceived divisions extend to sentiments for objects of collective memory meant to represent shared values remains unknown. Relying on a dataset measuring public sentiments toward the 15 most institutionally consecrated iconic historical figures, we examine both polarization and false polarization, defined as the misperception that political opponents hold polarized views of these figures. We find little evidence of true polarization in sentiments toward iconic historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. In contrast, we find that false polarization is widespread, patterned, and asymmetric. Ultimately, we find that the false polarization of collective memory is rooted in partisan animus and social sorting into mental camps, both of which are amplified by homogeneous social networks and attenuated by crosscutting ties.