Between collective pasts and futures: The case of climate change

Abstract

Recent psychological scholarship shows that the way people think about the collective future can have important implications on the attitudes, intentions, and behaviors that they adopt in relation to climate change. In this article, we argue that a more complete understanding of these phenomena requires a deeper consideration of the intertwined psychological, social, and political lives of collective pasts and futures. Drawing on work across disciplines, we highlight not only how collective memory can alter how we interpret the collective future, but also how the collective future can alter how we (re)interpret the collective past. We conclude by discussing how the psychological sciences might go about advancing the experimental study of interactions between collective memory and future thinking.