Do emotional and social primers change the pessimism in collective future thinking? Testing the robustness of the collective negativity bias

People are not optimistic about the future of the USA. When reporting their thoughts about the future, people express more worries than excitement, a phenomenon known as the collective negativity bias, and widely replicated among people residing in the USA. However, we do not know whether this bias is malleable. In this study, we tested whether prior exposure to valenced examples of collective future projections – attributed to an unknown source or a social source – shifts the valence of collective future thinking. In Experiment 1, participants completed an unrelated task (standard control condition) or viewed neutral examples (a modified control condition) generated by an unknown source. In Experiment 2, participants viewed neutral examples from an unknown source (as in Experiment 1), positive examples from an unknown source, or positive examples from their peers. In Experiment 3, participants viewed negative examples instead of positive ones, before reporting future projections. Experiment 4 added more power to detect interactions, using as primers the neutral, negative, and positive unspecified examples. Across all experiments, the collective negativity bias persisted and was comparable regardless of the valence or source of primers. This consistency is striking given that collective future projections are unbounded by reality, yet they seem resistant to primers we used. We discuss how these findings may help inform us about the underlying mechanisms of the collective negativity bias and guide future research on testing its robustness.