How perceived group status affects negativity bias in collective future thinking

Abstract

People expect their social groups’ future to be mainly negative. In our group’s previous research, we found that ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) voters expected Turkey’s future to be less negative than main-opponent Republican People’s Party (CHP) voters. This may have been due to AKP voters perceiving themselves as a more advantaged group. Based on these findings, in this thesis we tested the relationship between perceptions of societal status and future projections, focusing on college and national level identities. To test this, after highlighting the advantages or disadvantages of being a Boğaziçi University student/graduate, we asked Boğaziçi students to provide two events that might happen in the near and distant future of their university and to rate their emotional valence. One group read about academic advantages of Boğaziçi students/alumni compared to other universities and the other group read the opposite. All participants also provided subjective sense of privilege ratings and identified possible events in Turkey’s near and distant future. In either category, there was no relationship between feelings of social advantageousness and future projections’ emotional valence; events were on average more negative. Only for the events expected to occur in Boğaziçi’s near future and related to school prestige, the difference between the groups was marginally significant. Events expected to occur in distant future were less negative and more central to participants’ identity. Temporal distance also influenced how positive and negative events were evaluated. We discussed our findings in relation to group dynamics and temporal properties of collective future thoughts.