100 years after: What is the relation between pacifist attitudes and social representations of the Great War?

In this paper we use a social representational perspective to consider the interplay between pacifist attitudes and representations of World War I, on a large sample of European students. WWI gave rise to pacifist movements across the globe. Across 10 European countries (N = 1347 undergraduate students), we invited participants to report the first five words that came to their mind when thinking about this event and measured their level of pacifism. Analyses of the reported words revealed the presence of seven lexical classes corresponding to two main perspectives on WWI. The first main perspective was characterized by “analytical” representations of the war, with a focus on the places and actors of WWI. The second perspective highlighted negative emotions and appraisals associated with war. Overall, we found that the pacifist attitudes we analyzed were associated with a view of the conflict in terms of negatively valanced words, both at the emotional level and in terms of concrete consequences. Conversely lower pacifist attitudes were linked with an emphasis upon weapons. The present results help fill a gap in the literature on attitudes toward peace and war by evidencing their interplay with the way individuals view war. These findings allow us to establish a connection between mainstream, individual-centered approach to attitudes relying on individual premises and social representation theory. Moreover, in line with historical scholarship, these results suggest that a common interpretational framework underlies a view of the conflict associated with the pacifist wave that emerged a hundred years ago and current pacifist attitudes. Finally, the present study is the first large scale psychology study of the social representations of the Great War.