People from the US and China Think about Their Personal and Collective Future Differently

Deng, Will; Rosenblatt, Alexa; Talhelm, Thomas; Putnam, Adam L.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4155116

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…A latent variable was created for the future infection rate prediction, integrating four questions requesting an estimate of the percentage of the population that will be infected in the future in local community, Ontario, Canada, and World. This combination was a valid approach considering two things: (1) the lack of a positivity bias for personal over collective future prediction in this sample, similar to previous findings with Chinese samples [ 15 , 16 ]; (2) all four items loaded (standardized values ranged from 0.801 to 0.965) well above the recommended value of 0.40 [ 17 ], supporting the appropriateness of a single latent variable for future infection prediction [ 18 , 19 ]. Additionally, all four variables showed consistent positive correlations ( rs = 0.636–0.888, ps < 0.001).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 84%

Demographic and COVID Experience Predictors of COVID-19 Risk Perception among Chinese Residents in Canada

Lecompte

Counsell

Yang

2022

IJERPH

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The current study aimed to identify demographic and COVID experience predictors for COVID-19 risk perception among Chinese residents in Canada. A final sample of 653 participants aged 18 and up completed an online survey in simplified Chinese during the peak of the first wave of COVID-19 (25 April–10 June 2020). After removing those with missing data on demographic covariates, as missing data cannot be imputed, 444 were included in the structural equation model, and COVID-19 risk perception was indexed by three outcome variables: self-infection risk perception (i.e., likelihood of personal infection of COVID-19); threat perception (i.e., whether the pandemic is a real threat); and future infection rate prediction (i.e., a latent variable for community, Ontario, Canada, and World infection rate predictions). Predictors included demographic (i.e., income, gender, education, age, household size, employment status, and life satisfaction) and COVID experience variables (i.e., personal connection with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases, self-isolation experience, perceived anti-Chinese discrimination, and confusion over COVID-19 information). In the structural equation model, we found increased risk perception for the following demographic and COVID experience predictors; women, relatively higher education, living alone, working in a medical field, lower in life satisfaction, having personal connection with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases, with perceived anti-Chinese discrimination, or showing high confusion over COVID-19 information.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 84%

Demographic and COVID Experience Predictors of COVID-19 Risk Perception among Chinese Residents in Canada

Lecompte

Counsell

Yang

2022

IJERPH

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“…This is consistent with the finding that people routinely remember negative events for the collective past (Liu et al 2005; see also Cyr and Hirst 2019), but contrasts with the fact that they remember mostly positive events for the personal past (Kahneman et al 2009). Another study obtained somewhat different results with Chinese students, who showed roughly equal rates of positivity for the past and the future (Deng et al 2022). We look forward to future research that will explore similarities and differences in individual and collective remembering and future thinking across nations and cultures.…”

Section: Collective Future Thinking and Mental Time Travelsupporting

confidence: 78%

Themes for future research on memory, mind and media

Wertsch

Roediger

2022

Mem. Mind & Media

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We describe three areas of inquiry that we foresee as being important in future studies of collective memory, mind, and media. The first is the power of narratives, usually provided by collectives, which can be explicit and conscious or implicit and unconscious. A second important theme during this period of populism and nationalism is the study of the self-centredness (or egocentricity) of groups, especially nations believing their past is special. Such egocentricity can feed conflict among nations as well as groups within nations. The third important direction for research is future thinking, or studies of how people anticipate events they expect to unroll in their future and whether these events are mostly positive or negative. A puzzle of future thinking relative to collective memory is why people readily argue about and even fight over events from the past, but find it much more difficult to mobilise groups about life-threatening future events such as global warming or nuclear war. We look forward to studies in these crucial topics and others as they appear in Memory, Mind & Media.

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“…Cross-cultural psychology (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991) suggests that positivity biases in general are less prevalent in non-Western societies. Little research has explicitly examined cultural variability in intertemporal representations and implicit trajectories concerning the self across cultures (however, see Deng et al, 2022, for some suggestive early work in Chinese and American samples). Until such programmatic work has progressed further, we suggest remaining cognizant of the possibility that the effects reported are culturally bound, particularly since the content and general structure of at least one component of personal temporal thought, autobiographical memory, varies considerably between cultures (Wang, 2004(Wang, , 2016.…”

Section: Age Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As with personal temporal thought, we advise caution in universalizing these findings, given that little research in collective temporal thought has been done in non-Western populations. Some early findings in Chinese and Turkish samples suggest collective temporal thought may indeed be culturally variable, although negativity biases do seem common (Deng et al, 2022;Hacibektasoglu et al, 2022;Mert et al, 2022). Living historical memories in Western countries tends to be more negative than in developing countries (Choi et al, 2021).…”

Section: Collective Temporal Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit intertemporal trajectories in cognitive representations of the self and nation

2022

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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.

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People from the US and China Think about Their Personal and Collective Future Differently

Cited by 3 publications

References 40 publications

Demographic and COVID Experience Predictors of COVID-19 Risk Perception among Chinese Residents in Canada

Demographic and COVID Experience Predictors of COVID-19 Risk Perception among Chinese Residents in Canada

Themes for future research on memory, mind and media

Implicit intertemporal trajectories in cognitive representations of the self and nation

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