Description

“What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.” – bell hooks

We often think about how our lives may unfold over time (D’Argembeau et al., 2011); for example, we might think about specific personal plans such as retirement, or more broadly, about who will become the next leader of our country. In cognitive-psychological research, the latter type of thinking about future collective events is known as collective future thinking (de Saint-Laurent, 2018; Merck et al., 2016; Szpunar & Szpunar, 2016). In this line of work, we aim to understand how people imagine the collective future and test whether future imaginations can be shaped:

View

Excerpt from Peña & Rajaram (in press) at PBR

“We asked whether people would show a shift in the collective negativity bias after viewing valenced primers and when these primers are attributed to their peers. Specifically, across four experiments we investigated whether being primed by valenced or neutral statements and whether learning that one’s peers (as opposed to a nonsocial source) are relatively optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the United States can modify the collective negativity bias. Across all experiments, the collective negativity bias remained robust; it was also comparable across conditions despite exposure to primers that were emotionally valenced and, in some cases, were attributed to social sources.”