Collective nostalgia: A group-level emotion that confers unique benefits on the group.

Abstract

This research established collective nostalgia as a group-level emotion and ascertained the benefits it confers on the group. In Study 1, participants who reflected on a nostalgic event they had experienced together with ingroup members (collective nostalgia) evaluated the ingroup more positively and reported stronger intentions to approach (and not avoid) ingroup members than those who recalled a nostalgic event they had experienced individually (personal nostalgia), those who reflected on a lucky event they had experienced together with ingroup members (collective positive), and those who did not recall an event (no recall). In Study 2, collective (vs. personal) nostalgia strengthened behavioral intentions to support the ingroup more so than did recalling an ordinary collective (vs. personal) event. Increased collective self-esteem mediated this effect. In Study 3, collective nostalgia (compared to recalling an ordinary collective event) led participants to sacrifice money in order to punish a transgression perpetrated against an ingroup member. This effect of collective nostalgia was more pronounced when social identification was high (compared to low). Finally, in Study 4, collective nostalgia converged toward the group average (i.e., was socially shared) when participants thought of themselves in terms of their group membership. The findings underscore the viability of studying nostalgia at multiple levels of analysis and highlight the significance of collective nostalgia for understanding group-level attitudes, global action tendencies, specific behavioral intentions, and behavior.

Nostalgia Promoting Pro-Social Behavior and Its Psychological Mechanism

“…There is other evidence shows that collective nostalgia is a group-level emotion, which is beneficial to the group [19]. For example, increasing the positive comments and support for members of the group, sacrificing money to punish people who are bad for the group members, and so on.…”

Collective memory of a dissolved country: Group-based nostalgia and guilt assignment as predictors of interethnic relations between diaspora groups from former Yugoslavia

“…Research on past-oriented group-based nostalgia indicates that while being nostalgic about the national past can bring in-group members closer together (Wildschut, Bruder, Robertson, van Tilburg, & Sedikides, 2014), this same sentiment can also have detrimental effects on intergroup relations (Smeekes, 2015;Smeekes, Verkuyten, & Martinovic, 2015). This research has primarily focused on European immigrant-receiving societies such as the Netherlands, and it shows that the more nostalgic majority members are about their culturally homogeneous national past, the less willing they are to accept immigrants.…”

Collective memories and present-day intergroup relations: Introduction to the Special Thematic Section

“…Since the seminal paper by Doosje and colleagues (1998) showing how "guilt by association" leads to the desire to compensate out-group members for past misdeeds, much research has been dedicated to understanding the role of 'collective' emotions for intergroup relations. More recently, Wildschut, Bruder, Robertson, van Tilburg, and Sedikides (2014) proposed that nostalgia should be conceptualized as a group-based emotion, in the sense that it encourages and guides relevant group attitudes and behavior. In this line, the paper by Cheung, Sedikides, Wildschut, Tausch, and Ayanian (2017, this section) presents data from a survey study conducted during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong.…”