Valance and Perceived Control in Personal and Collective Future Thinking

Abstract

Prior studies have shown that people imagine their personal future to be more positive than their country’s future. The present research extends the nascent literature by examining the valence and perceived control of personal and collective future events in a new experimental paradigm, the cultural generalizability of the findings, and their relations to psychological well-being. US college students (Study 1) and US and Turkish community participants (Study 2) imagined what might happen to them and their country in three time points (i.e., next week, next year, and in 10-15 years). They then rated the emotional valence and perceived control of the events and completed a psychological well-being measure. Both US and Turkish participants imagined their personal future to be more positive than their country’s future, whereas they attributed higher perceived control to their countries for collective future events than to themselves for personal future events. The positivity of personal and collective future events predicted better psychological well-being, whereas perceived control did not. These original findings enrich our theoretical understanding of future thinking.