WHERE DID 1850 HAPPEN FIRST—IN AMERICA OR IN EUROPE? A Cognitive Account for a Historical Bias

his students were often surprised to learn that some event in America happened at about the same time as another in Europe, because the American event seemed to them to have happened more recently. We confirmed the validity of this anecdotal observation experimentally, and offer an explanation. We discuss how this bias may be an effect of judgment, rather than memory. We then show experimentally that stu-dents like those who demonstrated the bias regarded America as the New World, as opposed to Europe’s Old World. Our theoretical ac-count, based on judgment by representativeness, posits that if one cat-egory is deemed more X than another (e.g., American history is deemed more “recent ” than European history), then its members will be judged more X than members of the other, ceteris paribus. Hence, an American historical event will appear more recent than a contem-poraneous European event. Some years ago, a historian colleague1 contacted one of us. He ha