Browsing by Author "Cole, Scott"

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Citation - WoS: 21
Citation - Scopus: 25
Collective Remembering and Future Forecasting During the Covid-19 Pandemic: How the Impact of Covid-19 Affected the Themes and Phenomenology of Global and National Memories Across 15 Countries
(Springer, 2023) Oner, Sezin; Yaman, Sezin Öner; Watson, Lynn Ann; Adiguzel, Zeynep; Ergen, Irem; Bilgin, Ezgi; Curci, Antonietta; Cole, Scott; Psychology
The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances in which to investigate collective memory and future simulations of events reported during the onset of a potentially historic event. Between early April and late June 2020, we asked over 4,000 individuals from 15 countries across four continents to report on remarkable (a) national and (b) global events that (i) had happened since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, and (ii) they expected to happen in the future. Whereas themes of infections, lockdown, and politics dominated global and national past events in most countries, themes of economy, a second wave, and lockdown dominated future events. The themes and phenomenological characteristics of the events differed based on contextual group factors. First, across all conditions, the event themes differed to a small yet significant degree depending on the severity of the pandemic and stringency of governmental response at the national level. Second, participants reported national events as less negative and more vivid than global events, and group differences in emotional valence were largest for future events. This research demonstrates that even during the early stages of the pandemic, themes relating to its onset and course were shared across many countries, thus providing preliminary evidence for the emergence of collective memories of this event as it was occurring. Current findings provide a profile of past and future collective events from the early stages of the ongoing pandemic, and factors accounting for the consistencies and differences in event representations across 15 countries are discussed.
Spatial Optimism in Individuals Future Thinking About the Covid-19 Pandemic
(Wiley, 2025) Oner, Sezin; Szpunar, Karl; Watson, Lynn Ann; Cole, Scott
Spatial optimism is the tendency to underestimate the severity of environmental threats in local relative to global contexts. We investigated whether spatial optimism was evident in people's beliefs about the estimated duration and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants from 15 countries provided estimates of (i) when the pandemic would be brought under control and (ii) infection rates for their country and globally. Overall, individuals estimated that the pandemic would end sooner and with a lower infection rate in their own country relative to the rest of the world. This spatial optimism bias was moderated by the severity of COVID-19 at the country level, such that the bias was greatest in countries with lower levels of pandemic severity. Findings parallel those observed for environmental threats and provide evidence for a spatial optimism bias in a distinct domain of collective thought. Implications for public-health messaging are discussed.