Who controls the present controls the past?. Psychosocial effects of the Truth Commission's evaluations and the social representations of history in Brazil.

Abstract

The thesis aims to investigate the Brazilian Truth Commission's (TC) impact and evaluations and the social representations of history regarding the military regime in Brazil. Another goal was to integrate the results about the TCs with similar studies conducted in other countries in South America. Methods of research included questionnaires, word-association task and the analysis of the spontaneous discourses in the media. Although we found extreme criticism in the on-line comments about the commission, results from questionnaires showed that the commission is well evaluated. Political and social attitudes as well as the emotions elicited by the TC were found to be important variables on its evaluation. We found evidences for the association of psychosocial variables to different emotions, attitudes and representations towards the dictatorial past. We found that especially low education and support for authoritarianism were associated to a positive dictatorship representation. Finally, in the fourth study, results globally seems to support the idea that a positive evaluation of the TC effectiveness is associated to both, more trust in institutions and more positive socio-emotional climate. These associations seem to be moderated by contextual factors such as the level of violence perpetrated and social trust in the government and in the democracy. These results are globally discussed through the framework presented in the theoretical and empirical review leading to the conclusions pointing out the relation of the findings to the construction of the collective memory and social representations of history fields as well as to possible future lines of investigation.