Weaponised Pasts is a Leverhulme-funded project examining the evolution of heritage-based hostility online and in the lab, led by Dr Chiara Bonacchi, with Dr Zachary Horne and Dr Alberto Acerbi.
Overview
Interpretations of the human past are routinely weaponised online to frame others as enemies. Such hostility can undermine democratic discourse, cause distress, and translate into violence offline. This is one of the most challenging and unresolved problems within public archaeology, heritage and identity studies today. Without establishing how heritage-based hostile narratives spread, and why some may be pervasive on social media, it has not been possible to determine ways of curtailing this phenomenon.
Weaponised Pasts will address this long-standing issue through a novel approach – the first to combine public archaeology, cultural evolution and psychological theory.
The team will study the evolution of heritage-based hostility both in ‘real-world’ social media environments and experimentally. Based on our results, we will provide recommendations for limiting the diffusion of heritage-based hostility online.
Objectives
We will develop a theoretical framework to study the weaponisation of the past, and establish its causal mechanisms, by answering the following questions:
- What features of heritage content and language are more strongly asssociated with hostility on social media?
- How do content-focused factors interact with context-related aspects of the communication and the values of social media users to predict the emergence, transformation and spread of hostile narratives?
- What kinds of hostile narratives result from the evolution of communications about heritage on social media, who do they antagonise and how can they be prevented?