ArticlePublisher preview available

Collectives Closer to the Self Are Anticipated to Have a Brighter Future: Self-Enhancement in Collective Cognition

American Psychological Association
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Authors:
Dorthe Berntsen at Aarhus University
Dorthe Berntsen
David C. Rubin
David C. Rubin
David C. Rubin
  • This person is not on ResearchGate, or hasn't claimed this research yet.
Read publisher preview
Download citation
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

Collective future thinking is a budding research field concerned with the act of imagining possible events in the future of a collective—typically one’s nation. Prior research has shown that people imagine more positive than negative events in the personal future but more negative than positive events in the collective future. This interaction has been interpreted as a valence-based dissociation between collective and personal cognition. We examine if degrees of self-relatedness may account for these effects. In Study 1, participants (N = 299) imagined events in the future of their country and family, rated how central they viewed these collectives to their self and identity and rated the collectives’ futures for positive and negative valence. Positive and negative valence of the imagined collective futures was strongly associated with how central the collectives were viewed to the self. In Study 2, participants (N = 306) rated self-centrality, personal agency, and moral decline perceived for their country. All three measures explained independent variance in how positive the future was for their country. In Study 3, participants (N = 310) self-nominated collectives that they viewed as highly versus minimally central to their self and identity. The futures of highly central collectives were rated more positive than negative, whereas such positive bias was absent for the futures of minimally self-central collectives. Overall, the findings indicate that a continuum of different degrees of self-relatedness may explain the Valence × Domain interaction in previous work, and suggest a need to integrate research on collective future thinking with self-serving biases in social cognition.
A preview of this full-text is provided by American Psychological Association.
Learn more
Content available from Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Collectives Closer to the Self Are Anticipated to Have a Brighter Future:
Self-Enhancement in Collective Cognition
Dorthe Berntsen
1
and David C. Rubin
1, 2
1
Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Aarhus University
2
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University
Collective future thinking is a budding research field concerned with the act of imagining possible events in
the future of a collective—typically one’s nation. Prior research has shown that people imagine more positive
than negative events in the personal future but more negative than positive events in the collective future.
This interaction has been interpreted as a valence-based dissociation between collective and personal cog-
nition. We examine if degrees of self-relatedness may account for these effects. In Study 1, participants (N=
299) imagined events in the future of their country and family, rated how central they viewed these collect-
ives to their self and identity and rated the collectives’futures for positive and negative valence. Positive and
negative valence of the imagined collective futures was strongly associated with how central the collectives
were viewed to the self. In Study 2, participants (N=306) rated self-centrality, personal agency, and moral
decline perceived for their country. All three measures explained independent variance in how positive the
future was for their country. In Study 3, participants (N=310) self-nominated collectives that they viewed as
highly versus minimally central to their self and identity. The futures of highly central collectives were rated
more positive than negative, whereas such positive bias was absent for the futures of minimally self-central
collectives. Overall, the findings indicate that a continuum of different degrees of self-relatedness may
explain the Valence ×Domain interaction in previous work, and suggest a need to integrate research on col-
lective future thinking with self-serving biases in social cognition.
Public Significance Statement
We show that whether people perceive their country’s future as emotionally positive or negative is
strongly affected by how central the country is perceived to their personal self and identity. Since per-
ceiving a collective’s future as prosperous or worrying has implications for the kind of decisions and
commitments people may be willing to make in relation to this collective, identifying the underlying
mechanisms that drive such assessments is important.
Keywords: collective future thinking, Centrality of Event Scale, positivity bias, agency, and moral decline
Supplemental materials: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001550.supp
Positive and negative events are both part of life, and which of
them exerts a stronger impact on our thoughts, memory, and health
has been a topic of debate for decades. Some scholars have claimed
that “bad is stronger than good”(Baumeister et al., 2001), while oth-
ers have asserted that positive judgments and positive memories
dominate (Matlin, 2017;Matlin & Stang, 1978;Walker et al.,
2003). Adding to the complexity, recent research has introduced
the view that positively and negatively biased cognition maps onto
a distinction between personal and collective cognition. A number
of studies have shown that personal cognition (thinking about
one’s own past and future) is generally positively biased, whereas
collective cognition (thinking about the past and future of one’s
nation) is negatively biased (Liu & Szpunar, 2023;Shrikanth &
Szpunar, 2021;Shrikanth et al., 2018). Here we show that positively
versus negatively biased cognition does not adhere to a simple dis-
tinction between the collective and the personal. We introduce the
alternative view that findings interpreted to support such dissociation
instead reflect degrees of self-relatedness varying across these two
This article was published Online First March 28, 2024.
Dorthe Berntsen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5941-314X
This research was supported by a grant from the Independent Research
Fund, Denmark (9037-00015B) and the Carlsberg Foundation (CF22-
0415). The funding sources had no role in the study design, data collection,
analysis or interpretation of the data, writing of the article, or the decision to
submit the article for publication. The authors thank Daniel Munkholm
Møller for help with the online data collection. The authors declare no con-
flicts of interest. Data are available at https://osf.io/an58r/. Study material is
available in the online supplemental materials.
Dorthe Berntsen served as lead for data curation, funding acquisition,
investigation, project administration, visualization, and writing–original draft.
David C. Rubin served in a supporting role for formal analysis. Dorthe
Berntsen and David C. Rubin contributed equally to conceptualization, formal
analysis, writing–review and editing, and methodology.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dorthe
Berntsen, Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Aarhus University,
Bartholins Allé 11, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Email: dorthe@psy.au.dk
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
© 2024 American Psychological Association 2024, Vol. 153, No. 5, 1226–1235
ISSN: 0096-3445 https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001550
1226
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
... As people identify with their countries more, view their society as less disintegrated, they imagine the country's future to be more positive (Mert et al., 2023;Ionescu et al., 2022;Hazan et al., 2024). Thus, the more central their identity their group is (family or nation), people they view the future of that group in a more positive light ("centrality to self"; Berntsen & Rubin, 2024). Agency proves to be crucial here, as this centrality is associated with the degree of agency they attribute to themselves over country levelevents (Berntsen & Rubin, 2024). ...
... The concept of agency is especially critical in the context of national elections. Individuals rarely have a chance to in uence collective events -re ected in the low-level self-agency scores (Berntsen & Rubin, 2024;Topçu & Hirst, 2020;Topçu & Hirst, 2024). Elections are probably the most salient contexts in which individuals have a sense of self-agency in deciding where the country is headed. ...
Beyond Winners and Losers: Collective Mental Time Travel Pathways Buffer Future Agency after Elections
Preprint
Full-text available
  • May 2025
Research on collective mental time travel has shown thematic links between past and future events, but how specific events cue past and future events in relation to sociopolitical identity remains underexplored. Connecting the collective past to the future, we primarily focused on event characteristics to identify collective mental pathways using a data-driven, bottom-up approach. We focused on the 2023 Turkish Presidential Election as a pivotal event anchoring collective memories and related future projections. Using representative in-person interviews, we asked participants to evaluate the election, recall related past and future collective events, and rate each event’s characteristics (e.g. Valence, Vividness, Agency, Importance). Our analyses identified four unique pathways of traveling to the collective past from the election night based on these ratings. The resultant pathways mapped onto sociopolitical divides in age, voting behavior, party identification, religiosity and political orientation. These pathways revealed how certain ways of thinking of the past and the future offer psychological buffers against electoral loss. Specifically, processing the election protected future individual agency, and remembering an agentic, inclusive past scaffolded future political group agency. Our findings point to shared cognitive processes behind sociopolitical divides.
View
... People consistently see themselves as morally superior to the average person (Ding & Sugiura, 2024;Sedikides et al., 2014;Tappin & McKay, 2017), a robust cognitive bias consistent with the "Better-Than-Average Effect" (BTAE; Alicke et al., 1995;Alicke & Govorun, 2005;Brown, 1986;Dunning et al., 1989;Zell et al., 2020). This phenomenon transcends moral judgments and has been documented in various domains including competence (Dunning et al., 1989;Kim & Han, 2023), happiness (Klar & Giladi, 1997, 1999, and even optimism about the future of one's ingroup (Berntsen & Rubin, 2024). However, much of the psychological research on the BTAE in the moral domain has focused on comparing self-perceptions (how people judge their own moral character) to third-party perceptions (how people judge others' moral character) of specific characterological traits, such as honesty, fairness, and generosity. ...
... People tend to perceive their own traits, characteristics, and abilities as superior to those of others-a phenomenon known as the "Better-Than-Average Effect" (BTAE) or "self-enhancement bias" (Alicke et al., 1995;Alicke & Govorun, 2005;Brown, 1986;Dunning et al., 1989;Zell et al., 2020). This effect has been widely documented across various areas of selfevaluation (e.g., competence, happiness; Berntsen & Rubin, 2024;Critcher et al., 2015;Dunning et al., 1989;Kim & Han, 2023;Klar & Giladi, 1997, 1999 and is thought to stem from the fundamental psychological need for self-enhancement-the motivation to maintain a positive self-image and high self-esteem (Brookes, 2015;Brown et al., 1988;Gebauer et al., 2013;Sedikides & Gregg, 2008;Wojciszke & Białobrzeska, 2014). Among the many domains in which people exhibit inflated self-perceptions, morality stands out as particularly pronounced (Aquino & Reed II, 2002;Ding & Sugiura, 2024;Goodwin et al., 2014;Tappin & McKay, 2017). ...
People are More Skeptical of Others’ Public Virtue Motivations than Their Own
Preprint
Full-text available
  • Feb 2025
Public virtuous acts inspire moral behavior but are judged more harshly than private ones, often seen as reputational rather than principled (virtue discounting). Why, then, do people persist in public virtue despite social costs? Across three primary studies, we tested whether the Better-Than-Average Effect (BTAE)—the tendency to view oneself more favorably—reduces the perceived threat of virtue discounting. Study 1 replicated virtue discounting but found no evidence of a BTAE in moral goodness ratings. Study 2 showed that while people discounted others’ public virtue, they expected their own to be judged as more principled. Study 3 extended this pattern—participants judged their own public virtue more favorably than others’ and expected observers to discount third-party actors more than they would discount the participants themselves. These findings reveal a fundamental asymmetry: people anticipate leniency for their own public virtue while expecting and applying greater skepticism toward others’.
View
... Collective future projections are less well researched, but some studies bear on this phenomenon. When individuals imagine the collective future of their country, the events are less positive than when they imagine personal future events and events in the collective future of their family 26,40,112,113 . Such findings suggest that people might narrate the country as 'in decline', while narrating their personal life as one of continued improvement. ...
View
... Это дает основания предполагать, что позитивная оценка будущего своей группы может усиливаться аутгрупповой дискриминацией [58]. Известно также, что чем сильнее групповая идентичность, чем более значимое место занимают социальные группы в Я-концепции личности, тем более позитивно оценивается их будущее [12]. Кроме того, есть эмпирические подтверждения того, что после переживания коллективной травмы позитивная оценка смещается с индивидуального будущего на будущее коллективное [74]. ...
The Pollyanna Effect: The role of positive personal and group identity defense mechanisms
Article
Full-text available
  • Jan 2025
p style="text-align: justify;"> Objective. To study the socio-psychological mechanisms supporting the effect of linguistic positivity and its dynamics in crisis conditions. Background . In the context of increasing hard-to-control climatic, military, economic and technological threats, research aimed at identifying the psychological mechanisms underlying the willingness of individuals and groups to positively evaluate themselves, their group and the world is becoming increasingly important. One of the results of such mechanisms is the Pollyanna effect – the tendency of people to give preference to positive information, manifested in assessments of the present, memories of the past and expectations about the future, and reflected in the prevalence of positive words over negative in the vocabulary of the language. Conclusions. Individual, interpersonal and group socio-psychological mechanisms of the linguistic positivity effect have been identified, among which the former are much better studied than the others. At the individual level, the Pollyanna effect is supported by patterns of perception of positive and negative information, emotion counter-regulation, coping mechanisms, and positive illusions that protect the positive identity of the individual. At the interpersonal level, these mechanisms are shared positive experiences, interpersonal attraction, and trust. At the group level – group identification, positive group emotions and mechanisms supporting positive evaluation of one's group: ingroup favoritism, perceptual refences, construction of collective memory and collective image of the future. The assumption that the contribution of group identity to the Pollyanna effect increases in crises associated with the experience of hard-to-control threat and collective trauma is stated. Promising directions of socio-psychological research in this area are outlined. The results of our empirical research indicate that group identity participates in the processes of emotional self-regulation and mobilization of psychological resources when experiencing an uncontrollable threat, reducing the level of individual and collective anxiety. Promising directions of socio-psychological research in this area are outlined.</p
View
Why Poverty in the Present Matters for Intergenerational Concern and the Future of Humanity
Preprint
Full-text available
  • Oct 2024
Contrary to perceived tensions between addressing present and future societal needs, we find present-day poverty and inequality are deeply connected with attitudes toward far-future welfare at both societal and individual levels. Study 1 (144 countries) shows that poorer, more unequal nations score lower on indices of intergenerational concern and farsighted policies. A Supplementary Study (34 countries, N = 123,502) shows that subjective SES predicts greater obligation to sacrifice for future lives, especially in nations with less inequality. In Study 2 (N = 1,264 Americans), individuals randomly assigned more resources allocate more to future generations, though not proportionately more. Replicating Study 1 and the Supplementary Study, real-world SES predicts higher donations beyond situational framings. Thus, combatting present-day societal challenges may be key to increasing concern and action for humanity’s future.
View
Why do Americans foresee a grim future for their country? The influences of country well-being, national identity, and news coverage
Article
  • Jan 2025
The present research examines the factors that contribute to a negative bias in how Americans imagine the future of their country. Specifically, we tested the effects of perceived country well-being, national identity (Study 1), and news coverage (Study 2) on Americans’ collective future thinking. Study 1 was situated in a cross-cultural context, in which US and Chinese participants listed within 1 min as many exciting or worrying events as they could that might happen in their country’s future and reported perceived country well-being and national identity. In Study 2, US participants read positive, negative, or neutral news events happening in their country and then imagined what might happen in their country’s near and distant futures. Americans imagined more negative relative to positive events and rated positive events less positively and negative events more negatively than did Chinese, with the cultural differences explained by the lower perceived country well-being among Americans. US participants exposed to negative news showed greater negative bias in their collective future thoughts than those exposed to neutral or positive news, and the effect was explained by the lower perceived country well-being in the negative news condition. These findings underscore the complexity of collective future perceptions and the significance of psychological and societal factors in shaping how people foresee their country’s future.
View
The illusion of moral decline
Article
Full-text available
  • Jun 2023
  • NATURE
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining1,2. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources³, the underuse of social support⁴ and social influence⁵.
View
The Good Old Days and the Scary Future Ones
Article
Full-text available
Building on the social psychology literature on collective memory, we tested if national nostalgia fosters collective angst through greater perceived societal anomie among French participants. Consistent with our predictions, a correlational study (N = 535) and an experimental study (N = 370) showed that nostalgia for France’s past predicted greater angst regarding its future through increased perceptions that present French society is more anomic than before. These findings suggest that (1) our representations of the national past shapes how we perceive present and future society and (2) national nostalgia, besides acting as a coping mechanism against existential threats as suggested in previous work, might also feed these threats by fostering perceptions of an anomic present and a frightening future.
View
Structure and Dynamics of Personal and National Event Cognition
Article
Full-text available
  • Dec 2022
General Audience Summary When people reflect on their past and look ahead to their future, they tend to focus on positive events, such as getting married, the birth of a child, or settling on a career. Conversely, when people reflect on the past and future of their nation, they often recall negative events, such as war, political turmoil, terrorism, and economic downturns. In this article, we bring these largely disparate findings together and attempt to make sense of how people hold onto a positive sense of themselves in the context of a negative national climate. After reviewing the literature, we turn our attention to the fact that our thoughts, whether they are directed toward personal or shared experiences, are governed by our daily experiences and culturally prescribed scripts and narratives that provide us with a sense of purpose and continuity. For instance, cultural life scripts dictate that there are prototypical events that we should all strive to experience and subsequently remember. Self-reflective narrative processes help to make sense of things when our experiences deviate from these scripts. Similarly, national narratives frame the history of nations, which is often borne out of conflict, in a meaningful way that shapes citizens’ sense of national identity. Such national narratives are likely to be less reflective of individuals’ daily lives. Critically, we suggest that holding a distinction between personal and public life, and hence an opportunity to view one as more positive or negative than the other, is more likely to occur in contemporary situations wherein people have the objective security to think of their lives as separate from that of their nation. We conclude by highlighting that how people think about the collective past and/or future can influence their behaviors in meaningful ways that bear significance for our systems of education and public policy.
View
People from the U.S. and China think about their personal and collective future differently
Article
Full-text available
  • Jul 2022
We investigated how people think about their personal life and their country by testing how participants in the U.S. and China think about personal and collective events in the past and future. Using a fluency task, we replicated prior research in showing that participants in the U.S. had a positivity bias toward their personal future and a negativity bias toward their country’s future. In contrast, participants in China did not display a positivity or negativity bias toward either their personal or collective future. This result suggests that the valence dissociation between personal and collective future thinking is not universal. Additionally, when people considered the past in addition to the future, they displayed similar valence patterns for both temporal periods, providing evidence that people think about the past and the future similarly. We suggest political and cultural differences (such as dialectical thought) as potential explanations for the differences between countries in future thinking and memory.
View
Correction to: what lies ahead of us? Collective future thinking in Turkish, Chinese, and American adults
Article
Full-text available
  • Jun 2022
The authors added missing author address and ORCID information to their article. Link to the article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360331866_What_Lies_Ahead_of_Us_Collective_Future_Thinking_in_Turkish_Chinese_and_Americans
View
“It Won’t Happen to Us”. Unrealistic Optimism Affects COVID-19 Risk Assessments and Attitudes Regarding Protective Behaviour
Article
Full-text available
  • Jul 2021
General Audience Summary The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged every country around the world. To contain the spread of the virus, governments have issued restrictions affecting everyday social life and urging citizens to adopt protective behaviours, such as keeping physical distancing, use of facemasks, hand sanitizer, etc. Nonetheless, people are unrealistically optimistic when assessing their own risk for contracting a disease—or when evaluating other negative future outcomes. This is termed unrealistic optimism in the literature. Research addressing how unrealistic optimism may demean the severity of the current pandemic and the risk of ourselves getting infected with COVID-19 relative to close others and acquaintances has been scarce. In this article, we show that unrealistic optimism occurs for risk evaluations of getting infected with COVID-19 and that this unrealistic optimism also arises when assessing the risk of infection for another person they consider close relative to an acquaintance. That is, we show that people assessed their own risk for contracting COVID-19 or currently being infected as lower compared to an acquaintance. However, people evaluated the risk of infection and the likelihood of currently being infected as equally low for themselves and for a close other. Similarly, we show that people estimated that they themselves and their close others would contract the virus—if that were to happen—further into the future, whereas their acquaintance might get infected in the near future. Our findings provide scientific evidence related to enquiries suggesting that coronavirus cases appear to be driven to a significant degree by casual occasions with family and people we know well and which may feel deceptively safe. Our findings have practical relevance by providing a deeper understanding of the cognitive biases influencing risk assessments and compliance with COVID-19 protective behaviours.
View
The good old days and the bad old days: evidence for a valence-based dissociation between personal and public memory
Article
Full-text available
  • Jan 2021
How does memory for the public past differ from memory for the personal past? Across five experiments (N = 457), we found that memories of the personal past were characterised by a positivity bias, whereas memories of the public past were characterised by a negativity bias. This valence-based dissociation emerged regardless of how far back participants recounted the personal and public past, whether or not participants were asked to think about significant events, how much time participants were given to retrieve relevant personal and public memories, and also generalised across various demographic categories, including gender, age, and political affiliation. Along with recent work demonstrating a similar dissociation in the context of future thinking, our findings suggest that personal and public event cognition fundamentally differ in terms of access to emotionally salient events. Direct comparisons between personal and public event memory should represent a fruitful avenue for research on event cognition.
View
Remembering a Nation’s Past to Imagine Its Future: The Role of Event Specificity, Phenomenology, Valence, and Perceived Agency
Article
Full-text available
  • Jul 2019
People are routinely involved in remembering the national past and imagining the national future, especially when making political decisions. These processes, however, have not been explored extensively. The present research aims to address this lacuna. In 2 experiments (N = 203), participants were asked to remember and imagine events that involve the United States. Later, they rated these events in terms of phenomenal characteristics, valence, and perceived agency (circumstance, self, other-people, nation). Their responses were also coded for specificity and content. Past and future responses correlated for specificity, phenomenology, valence, and the four domains of perceived agency. Despite this strong correspondence between past and future thinking, there were also differences. Future responses were less specific and more positive than past responses. Moreover, people thought that they themselves and their nation will have more control over their nation's future compared with the control they attributed to themselves and their nation over its past. The bias to be more optimistic about the nation's future was partly explained by this tendency to see the nation as more agentic in the future. Taken together, these results reveal striking similarities and divergences between autobiographical and collective mental time travel. The present research provides an exploration for the newly emerging field of collective mental time travel. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
View
How we have fallen: implicit trajectories in collective temporal thought View supplementary material
Article
Full-text available
Memory may play a critical role in the ability to imagine events in the future. While most work on this relation has concerned episodic memory and simulated episodic events in the future, the current study examines how collective memories relate to imagination for the collective future. Two thousand American participants provided events for (1) America’s origins, (2) normative events that all Americans should remember, and (3) events in America’s future. Each event was rated for emotional valence. Whereas collective memories – particularly origin events – showed pronounced positivity biases, there was a negativity bias in collective future thought, indicating an implicit trajectory of decline in Americans’ representations of their nation across time. Imagination for the social future may not be simulated based on the template of collective memories, but may rather relate to the past in a way that is mediated by cultural narrative schemata.
View
The impact of group identity on the interaction between collective memory and collective future thinking negativity: Evidence from a Turkish sample
Article
  • Jun 2022
Although several studies have addressed the relationship between memories and future projections regarding personal events, only a few studies exist on collective past and future events, almost all with North American samples. In two studies with Turkish samples, we investigated the relationship between sociopolitical identity and collective past and future representations. In Study 1, we compared the most important past and future collective events generated by voters of the ruling and the main opposition parties. Participants reported the two most important public events in the last 70 years and two in the next 70 years for Turkey, and rated events' valence, centrality, and transitional impact. Past events were dominated by national political events whereas future events' themes were more varied. Past events were also more negative than future events, with the negativity of future events decreasing as their temporal distance from the present increased. Opposition voters rated both the past and the future events more negatively than ruling party voters. In Study 2, we tested whether the negativity for future events may be due to perceived sociopolitical status of ruling party voters. Participants reported events from Turkey's future and provided ratings of status and privilege. We replicated the reduced negativity of distant compared to near future projections, but subjective sense of privilege was not related to events' valence. Overall, we demonstrated that in highly polarized societies, sociopolitical identity can impact the perceived valence of collective mental time travel outputs, diverging from findings of similar responses among Democrats and Republicans in the USA context.
View