ArticleMemory & cognition2023
People from the U.S. and China think about their personal and collective future differently.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- The American dream: Election night dreams predict overnight change in feelings about the election and the future.PloS one · 2026Article
- Chinese anticipate their country's future to be as bright as their personal future.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Valence-based biases in collective temporal thought: The role of question framing, culture, and age.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Demographic and COVID Experience Predictors of COVID-19 Risk Perception among Chinese Residents in Canada.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.