As democracies around the world face backsliding and mounting external pressures, the question of the drivers of societal resilience is being increasingly asked. An important part of the answer might well lie in the way individuals and communities think about their collective past and future. Indeed, to face societal challenges, one might posit that the presence in a policy of different memories and different expected futures fuels current conflicts, and shapes potential remedies to it. Therefore, this panel aims at illuminating various facets of the interaction between collective memory and collective future thinking. A better understanding of this central phenomenon will enable us to better grasp its consequences for democratic societies. More specifically, this panel will focus on the following questions: How do memory and future thinking interact? Are there specific patterns linking the content of collective memory and collective future thinking? What role does past, and future concerns play in shaping individual’s attitudes and political stances? How does all the above interact with the resilience of individuals and groups?
In its essence, this panel is interdisciplinary. It combines various branches of psychology (e.g., cognitive, social) with political sciences. This entails three main advantages. First, it will enable to leverage findings at the fundamental level to better understand sociopolitical issues. Second, it will lead to an interesting dialectic between micro- and macro-findings. Third, this will add multiple layers of answer to the research questions. This panel's four presentations are delving into the following topics: duty to remember, national narratives, moral roles, intertemporal trajectories, and historiography. Multiple cases (i.e., USA, China, Taïwan, Europe) and perspectives (empirical and theoretical) are proposed to give a more complete picture of the phenomenon at hand. All of them are pointing towards the necessity of jointly assessing memory and future thinking.
Nawël Cheriet, University of Liège - "The Duty to Remember: How Moral Imperatives to Recall the Past Shape Collective Future Thinking"
This paper develops a theoretical framework that bridges moral remembrance and collective future thinking (CFT) within social and cognitive psychology. The notion of a duty to remember, understood as the belief that groups have a moral responsibility to recall and transmit their past, has long occupied a central place in philosophy, history, and transitional justice. Yet it remains almost absent from psychological research. Meanwhile, studies of CFT have illuminated how groups imagine their futures but have largely overlooked the moral dimensions that guide this process.
I argue that moral remembrance operates as a cognitive and emotional filter through which communities project themselves forward in time. Drawing on theories of moral identity, collective agency, and mental time travel, I suggest that conceiving remembrance as a moral duty can both empower and constrain collective imagination. It may inspire visions of repair, justice, and continuity, yet at the same time limit the creative range of possible futures.
To ground this theoretical proposal, I present an experimental study examining whether activating a sense of moral duty to remember influences the thematic content, emotional tone, and perceived agency of imagined collective futures. By integrating moral cognition, commemorative practices, and future-oriented thinking, this work introduces a missing moral dimension to the psychology of collective memory. It ultimately invites a shift in focus: from how groups preserve their pasts to how moral imperatives to remember shape their shared capacity to anticipate, plan, and hope.
Jeremy K. Yamashiro, University of California, Santa Cruz - “Official historiography as a frame for future thinking: Chinese Collective Memory and the Future of Taiwan”
National Narratives bind representations of the past and future together into meaningful “arcs of history.” Here we examine the cognitive role such schematic trajectories play in shaping how people remember the collective past and imagine the collective future. Using semantic network analyses, we present a novel method for empirically studying the symbolic reserves of memory and future thinking available to a population, and how they might shift across contexts. Drawing on the case study of mainland China, we build on our prior work demonstrating that across generations during which official, top-down historiographical priorities have changed, the networks of collective memory and future thinking have shifted holistically in response. We previously demonstrated a link between a rehabilitated Nationalist Party in Chinese collective memory, along with increased emphasis on Japanese imperialism, and the “return” of Taiwan to PRC control in collective future thinking. In the current study, we report on an experimental study in which mainland Chinese participants were primed by writing narratives about Nationalist contributions to China, Japanese imperialism, or a control (religious history in classical China), to examine whether this framing in collective memory increases the centrality of the “return” of Taiwan in collective future thinking. We also discuss a narrative analysis of the memory protocols. This study serves to demonstrate how historically and culturally specific schematic narratives scaffold both memory and future thinking holistically in one of the contemporary world’s geopolitical hotspots.
Loïc Fierens, FNRS UCLouvain - “Memory of WWII & Intertemporal Trajectories as drivers of Europeans' peace and war attitudes"
This research project investigates how familial and collective memories of World War II, alongside intertemporal trajectories, shape individuals' attitudes toward peace and war. The central question guiding this study is: How do memories of WWII at both the familial and collective levels, and intertemporal trajectories, influence individuals’ attitudes toward war and peace? To explore this, data collected among university students across more than 30 European countries will be used. This demographic was selected for its potential to reflect emerging generational perspectives on historical memory and geopolitical attitudes. The survey captures, among others, data on participants’ intertemporal frames, their familial and national memory of WWII, and their attitudes toward peace and war. Different results are expected to emerge of the upcoming data analysis, with specific social roles and intertemporal emotions associated with either pro war or pro peace attitudes. Pro peace attitudes are hypothesized to correlate with emotions such as shame regarding the collective past, hope for the collective future, and a perceived sense of national progress. These attitudes are likely to be linked to familial roles such as bystander or help recipient, and collective roles of victim or help recipient during WWII. In contrast, pro war attitudes are expected to be associated with pride in the collective past, fear for the future, and a sense of national decline. These are projected to correspond with familial roles of victim or hero, and collective roles of hero, persecutor, or bystander. These results will shed light on how intergenerational narratives, collective memory and intertemporal emotions influence contemporary perspectives on war and peace across Europe. By mapping these associations across diverse national contexts, the research offers insights into the emotional and memory foundations of conflict attitudes.
Nazike Mert, Stetson University Imagining National Futures in a Polarized World: A case of American and Chinese Collective Future Thoughts How people imagine their nation’s future reflects their perceptions of its socio political economic conditions and the hope they hold for its trajectory.
In a polarized world, envisioning the future of other nations is equally revealing, as it provides a lens into perceptions of one’s country’s place in global standing and international landscape. The present research investigated collective future thinking within the context of two competing countries with distinct socio political economic systems and conflicting goals: the United States and China. In two studies, American and Chinese college students (Study 1) and community adults (Study 2) imagined national events that might occur in their own and in the other country in the near (within 1 year) and distant (10 15 years from now) future and rated the emotional valence of each event. Participants also completed measures of national identity and collective narcissism and reported the frequency and emotional tone of news coverage they consumed about each country. Across both studies, participants from both nations envisioned a more optimistic future for China than for the United States. Stronger national identity, greater collective narcissism, and positive news exposure was associated with greater optimism for one’s own country, particularly among Chinese community adults. Americans also showed optimism for the future of China when exposed to positive news. Notably, only collective narcissism uniquely predicted greater relative optimism for one’s own versus another country, and only among Chinese. These findings are consistent with Chinese narratives of national progress and collective optimism and with Americans’ perception of national decline and growing skepticism toward U.S. governance. They suggest that geopolitical rivalry and identity dynamics jointly shape how individuals imagine national and international futures.
Paper 2: Barry Zizhan Yao - University of California, Santa Cruz Paper 3: Pierre Bouchat - Université de Lorraine Paper 4: Qi Wang - Cornell University
William Hirst (discussant) ; Loïc Fierens (organizer)
