Collective representations elicit widespread individual false memories.

It is well known that the need to simplify a story, to preserve its consistency and to avoid discontinuity gaps, leads to memory distortions (Schacter, 2001). These biases allow one to preclude possible dissonances between the accurate recollection of past events and one’s own current knowledge or present situations upon which one should act. While most memories are specific to individuals, there are memories that are shared by entire groups of people who are homogeneous for social, ethnic and cultural characteristics or are connected by a common experience of a given event. The social nature of these collective memories is testified not only by their content, but also by the way in which they are fabricated. These memories are prone to ‘‘mental filters’’ (Zerubavel, 2003) which influence the mental representations of the events. These mental filters are instrumental in introducing modifications (e.g., inserting or omitting details) when members of the relevant group are asked to reconstruct the original event or the circumstances surrounding it, thus eliciting false memories which may reify as settled symbols. In turns, commemorations and symbols would frame any subsequent observations distorting their recollection to reconcile them with the frozen shared knowledge. Should individual distortions concerning a shared public event overlap, they would result in the formation of a distorted collective memory. The present study examined memories concerning one of the worst and deadliest terrorist attacks in Italian history, the Bologna massacre. On the morning of August 2nd, 1980, at 10.25, a bomb exploded in the main station of Bologna, Italy. Eighty-five people died and over 200 were wounded (see http://