Remembering and imagining: The role of the self

Imagining the future: A cross-cultural perspective on possible selves

“…As several generations in Turkey and Serbia have grown up heavily exposed to Western culture, it is to be expected that these young adults would be more similar to individuals from a typical Western country than to young adults from more traditional cultures. Advances in replicates previous studies by Chessell et al (2014) and Rathbone et al (2011) and suggests that young adults may only focus on the relatively near future when considering the type of person they are likely to become in the future. This finding broadly echoes results from Conway et al (2005), who showed that whilst the reminiscence bump occurs at approximately the same age across cultures, the content of the memories within the reminiscence bump is subject to cross-cultural variation.…”

“…We did not have specific predictions about these variables, other than that it was expected that the Serbian and Turkish participants would generate more possible selves involving others than the UK participants, reflecting previous work on the self-concept in interdependent and independent cultures (e.g., Rhee et al, 1995). We were also interested in the temporal distribution of possible selves, and predicted that participants from all cultures would date possible selves as emerging a mean of six to eight years into the future (e.g., Chessell et al, 2014;Rathbone et al, 2011).…”

“…This was an empirical question. Previous work has found that young adults in the UK date possible selves as emerging at a mean of only 6.35 (Chessell, Rathbone, Souchay & Moulin, 2014) and 7.39 (Rathbone et al, 2011) years into the future, despite having almost the whole lifespan to sample from. We aimed to investigate whether this short-term temporal focus would be replicated in the UK sample, and extend to participants from other cultures.…”

“…It was predicted that participants would generate possible selves that reflect cultural life script events, such as marriage, occupational transitions, and parenthood (events that feature in the life scripts of participants from a range of cultures, e.g., Rubin et al, 2009;Erdogan et al, 2008;Janssen, Uemiya & Naka, 2014). This proposal is supported by the results of Rathbone, Conway, and Moulin (2011), who examined the temporal distributions of British young adults' possible and current selves. Although detailed coding of possible selves was not conducted, 55% of all future selves generated were related to either marriage, becoming a parent, or getting a job -all key features of the cultural life script.…”

“…Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006;Waid & Frazier, 2003). Here we extend the analysis to also include the temporal distribution (based on participantgenerated dates) and ratings of possible selves, following the protocols for cognitive examination of the self (Rathbone et al, 2011) and life scripts (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004). For example, would all participants picture themselves at a similar point in the future, or would there be cultural differences in the timeframes of possible selves?…”