Warm sun on your face, a gentle salty breeze, the sound of ocean waves. Your friend earnestly suggests surfing lessons, and you both laugh as you imagine the two of you gracelessly tumbling through the water.
Could imagining this beachside road trip together bring you closer, before you even pack your bags? Is imagining a shared future together the first step toward creating one?
From friends and family to lovers and acquaintances, people collaborate all the time to imagine shared experiences. They can be as whimsical as make-believe, as mundane as what’s for dinner, or as consequential as the future of our politics and planet.
Yet social scientists have traditionally researched imagination as an individual psychological process.
Ourresearch in the Imagination and Cognition Lab at University at Albany, SUNY has studied the various ways that imagination can shape people’s social and emotional lives. While “imagination” can refer to many different ideas and processes, the form of imagination our work focuses on involves the ability to mentally create and represent novel, hypothetical, personal experiences that are specific in time and place.
To begin to bridge the gap between how psychologists understand an individual’s capacity to imagine and how social interactions can affect this cognitive process, we recently proposed a new framework of collaborative imagination – what we call co-imagination. It casts imagination as an interactive, co-creative process between two or more people in which they converse and collaborate to construct a shared representation of a specific possible experience.
With our colleagues Daniela Palombo and Christopher Madan, we set out to explore how collaboratively imagining a shared future with someone else might influence the shared relationship.
Warm sun on your face, a gentle salty breeze, the sound of ocean waves. Your friend earnestly suggests surfing lessons, and you both laugh as you imagine the two of you gracelessly tumbling through the water.
Could imagining this beachside road trip together bring you closer, before you even pack your bags? Is imagining a shared future together the first step toward creating one?
From friends and family to lovers and acquaintances, people collaborate all the time to imagine shared experiences. They can be as whimsical as make-believe, as mundane as what’s for dinner, or as consequential as the future of our politics and planet.
Yet social scientists have traditionally researched imagination as an individual psychological process.
By Chris Taylor NEW YORK - If you find it hard to plan for retirement, here is a little secret: It is hard for everyone – even the world’s foremost experts on the topic.