"The psychology of future thinking: From personal to collective cognition"

Abstract
The study of future thinking has a long history that cuts across various sub-disciplines within psychological science. Despite the myriad approaches that scientists have undertaken in the study of future-oriented cognition, almost all attention to date has focused on how people think about the personal future. However, people also spend considerable amounts of time thinking about the future of the world around them—i.e., the collective future. In this talk, I will present arguments as to why collective future thinking deserves more research attention and present new data from my laboratory demonstrating that personal and collective future thinking differ in fundamentally important ways that may have implications for how we interact with the world.