Brendan O'Connor

Department of Psychology

University at Albany

The Future We Imagine:

Emerging Evidence for the Structure

and Function of Collaborative Imagination

Previous efforts to understand how and why people imagine have focused on individuals independently imagining events. Yet little consideration has been given to the effects of imagining together as an interpersonal co-creative process. Here, we provide evidence that collaborative imagination exists and that it fosters social connection in novel dyads, synchronizing the content of imagined events to create shared narrative representations that are stored across partners. While there is much more work to be done, these findings begin to shed light on the nature and structure of imagination with implications for better understanding creativity, interpersonal relationships, group identity, future thinking, and collective cognition.