What lies ahead of us? Collective future thinking in Turkish, Chinese, and American adults

Valence and perceived control in personal and collective future thinking: the relation to psychological well-being

Prior studies have shown that people imagine their personal future to be more positive than their country's collective future. The present research extends the nascent literature by examining the valence and perceived control of personal and national future events in a new experimental paradigm, the cultural generalizability of the findings, and the relation of future thinking to psychological well-being. US college students (Study 1) and US and Turkish community participants (Study 2) imagined what might happen to them and their country in three time points (i.e., next week, next year, and in 10-15 years). They then rated the emotional valence and perceived control of the events and completed a psychological well-being measure. Both US and Turkish participants imagined their personal future to be more positive than their country's future, whereas they attributed higher perceived control to their countries for national future events than to themselves for personal future events. The positivity of national (Study 1) and personal future events (Study 2) predicted better psychological well-being, whereas perceived control did not. These original findings enrich our theoretical understanding of future thinking.

Remembering the good and bad and the self and others in a culturally modulated self-memory system

Wang and Conway (2006, Autobiographical memory, self, and culture. In L.-G. Nilsson, & N. Ohta (Eds.), Memory and society: Psychological perspectives (pp. 9-27). Psychology Press) posit that remembering takes place in a culturally modulated self-memory system in which working self-goals are shaped by society and, in turn, influence the encoding and construction of memories in a culturally canonical fashion. The current research examined the self-goal of competence, which manifests through self-enhancement versus self-improvement motivations, in influencing remembering in different cultural contexts. We conducted two cross-cultural studies to examine memories for personal successes and failures (Study 1) and autobiographical and vicarious experiences (Study 2) in connection with individuals' positive self-views. European Americans recalled a greater number of success than failure memories (Study 1) and US participants recalled a greater number of autobiographical than vicarious memories (Study 2), which was further associated with positive self-views at the individual level. In contrast, Asian (Study 1) and Chinese participants (Study 2) recalled even-handedly the different types of memories, and the memory retrieval was unrelated to individuals' self-views. We discuss the findings in light of the different manifestations of the competence goal in shaping memory in the culturally modulated self-memory system.

Collaborative imagination synchronizes representations of the future and fosters social connection in the present

From close friends to people on a first date, imagining a shared future appears fundamental to relationships. Yet, no previous research has conceptualized the act of imagination as a socially constructed process that affects how connected we feel to others. The present studies provide a framework for investigating imagination as a collaborative process in which individuals cocreate shared representations of hypothetical events-what we call collaborative imagination. Across two preregistered studies (N = 244), we provide evidence that collaborative imagination of a shared future fosters social connection in novel dyads-beyond imagining a shared future individually or shared experience in general. Subjective ratings and natural language processing of participants' imagined narratives illuminate the representational features of imagined events shaped by collaborative imagination. Together, the present findings have the potential to shift how we view the structure and function of imagination with implications for better understanding interpersonal relationships and collective cognition.

A preliminary experimental test of the crossed influences between the valence of collective memory and collective future thinking

This research experimentally examined the crossed influences between the emotional valence of collective memory and collective future thinking. As remembering the past and imagining the future are shaped by the present, we additionally test whether perceived anomie (i.e., perceiving present society as disintegrated and disregulated) would moderate these influences. Study 1 (N = 228 French participants) manipulated the valence of collective memory (positive vs. negative French past) to test its effect on the valence of collective future thinking. Results showed that the salience of a negative (vs. positive) French past lead to the projection of a more negative French future only among participants who perceived present society as highly disregulated. Study 2 (N = 215) focused on the influence of the valence of collective future thinking (positive vs. negative French future) on the valence associated with the French past. Results showed that the salience of a negative (vs. positive) French future lead left-wing participants to rate more positively events/figures of the French past that are usually valued by conservatives. Taken together, these studies provided evidence of conditional effects in the crossed influences between the emotional valence of collective memory and collective future thinking, thus contributing to the recent literature on collective mental time travel.

Implicit intertemporal trajectories in cognitive representations of the self and nation

Individual selves and the collectives to which people belong can be mentally represented as following intertemporal trajectories-progress, decline, or stasis. These studies examined the relation between intertemporal trajectories for the self and nation in American and British samples collected at the beginning and end of major COVID-19 restrictions. Implicit temporal trajectories can be inferred from asymmetries in the cognitive availability of positive and negative events across different mentally represented temporal periods (e.g., memory for the past and the imagined future). At the beginning of COVID-19 restrictions, both personal and collective temporal thought demonstrated implicit temporal trajectories of decline, in which future thought was less positive than memory. The usually reliable positivity biases in personal temporal thought may be reversable by major public events. This implicit trajectory of decline attenuated in personal temporal thought after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions. However, collective temporal thought demonstrated a pervasive negativity bias across temporal domains at both data collection points, with the collective future more strongly negative than collective memory. Explicit beliefs concerning collective progress, decline, and hope for the national future corresponded to asymmetries in the cognitive availability of positive and negative events within collective temporal thought.