Department of Psychology, Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Highway, Greenville, SC, 29613, USA.
University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2023 Jan;51(1):87-100. doi: 10.3758/s13421-022-01344-9. Epub 2022 Jul 20.
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.
我们通过测试美国和中国参与者对过去和未来个人和集体事件的看法，研究了人们如何看待自己的个人生活和国家。使用流畅性任务，我们复制了先前的研究结果，表明美国参与者对个人未来有积极偏见，对国家未来有消极偏见。相比之下，中国参与者对个人或集体未来都没有表现出积极或消极的偏见。这一结果表明，个人和集体未来思维之间的价值分离并非普遍存在。此外，当人们同时考虑过去和未来时，他们对这两个时间段表现出相似的价值模式，这为人们对过去和未来的思考方式相似提供了证据。我们认为，政治和文化差异（如辩证思维）可能是两国在未来思维和记忆方面存在差异的原因。
