People from the U.S. and China think about their personal and collective future differently

Valance and Perceived Control in Personal and Collective Future Thinking

“…Participants in both studies imagined personal future events to be more positive than collective events, replicating the previous emotional valence dissociation between personal and collective future thinking (Shrikanth et al, 2018(Shrikanth et al, , 2021. Thus, extending prior studies in which the fluency task was generally used (Deng et al, 2022;Shrikanth et al, 2018;Yamashiro & Roediger, 2019), the current studies used a rating task and demonstrated similarly that collective future thoughts are more negative than personal future thoughts.…”

“…To our knowledge, only one study compared personal and collective future thoughts in a non-Western sample. Using a fluency task, Deng et al (2022) replicated the findings of Shrikanth et al (2018) in a US sample but not Chinese sample. They found that US participants imagined more negative relative to positive future events for their country and more positive relative to negative future events for themselves, whereas Chinese participants imagined a similar number of positive and negative events in both personal and collective futures.…”

“…Based on the extant literature (e.g., Mert et al, 2022;Shrikanth et al, 2018), we expected that participants would imagine personal events to be more positive than collective events and distant events to be more positive than near events. For perceived control, we expected higher perceived control in personal than collective future events and higher control for near than distant future events (e.g., Deng et al, 2022;Topcu & Hirst, 2019). We expected similar patterns of results between Studies 1 and 2 and between the US and Turkish samples in Study 2.…”

Structure and dynamics of personal and national event cognition.

“…Although the study of the national future is relatively new on the event cognition scene, it is becoming increasingly apparent that, here too, people in Western countries tend to anticipate more negative than positive events (e.g., Deng et al, 2022;Hacıbektaşoğlu et al, 2022;Ionescu et al, 2022;Öner & Gülgöz, 2020;Shrikanth et al, 2018;Shrikanth & Szpunar, 2021;Yamashiro & Roediger, 2019; but see Mert et al, 2022;Topcu & Hirst, 2020;see Table 1, for a This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

“…We acknowledge that the robust evidence for positive event memories in personal life is anchored in two tendencies prevalent in Western societies: (a) cultural individualism (Triandis, 2018) and its signal production, independent self-construal (Markus & Kitayama, 1991); and (b) optimism and a focus on positive affect (Oishi, 2002;Taylor & Brown, 1988). Positive bias for personal memories could be attenuated (or eliminated) in national contexts where there is more of a focus on collectivism (e.g., people other than the self) and in societies where there is less emphasis on the desirability of maintaining positive affect (Deng et al, 2022;Heine et al, 1999Heine et al, , 2007. For example, in collectivist contexts, self-effacement is not necessarily taken literally but as a groupaffirming expression of modesty (Muramoto et al, 2009).…”