ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3751-6903

Date of Award

Fall 2025

Language

English

Embargo Period

11-7-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Psychology

Program

Social/Personality Psychology

First Advisor

Brendan Bo O'Connor

Committee Members

Jason D'Cruz, Mitch Earleywine

Keywords

Imagination; Collaborative imagination; Interpersonal relationship; Emotion; Natural language processing; Divergent thinking

Subject Categories

Cognitive Psychology | Social Psychology

Abstract

Humans are profoundly social: we play together, solve problems together, and work towards goals together. In doing so, we also imagine together. Yet cognitive research on imagination has largely remained focused on how an individual imagines the future, with little consideration of whether imagination could take place beyond the individual. This dissertation introduces a novel framework through which imagination is understood as a collaborative, interpersonally distributed process in which individuals co-create hypothetical events outside the present moment. Across six studies, this work investigates both the features of co-imagined events, and the potential functions co-imagination may have in social cognition. To this end, these studies assigned participants into dyads with a novel partner, and instructed participants to either 1) collaboratively imagine a shared future with their partner, 2) individually imagine a shared future involving their partner, or 3) collaboratively work on a game or view and describe a scene depicted in a photo (Manuscripts 1 & 2 only). All participants also completed a subsequent task in which they recalled the previously imagined event or perceived scene, enabling assessment of participants’ individual representations. The studies presented in Manuscript 1 examine the social effects of co-imagination, finding that participants who imagine collaboratively feel more socially connected to their partners, and consider their perspective more often than in other conditions. Analysis of individual participant narratives reveal that co-imagined events are retained as shared representations of the future across individual participants. Manuscript 2 expanded these insights and considered the emotions participants express within these shared representations. Across both studies, evidence reveals that while participants who co-imagine do not express similar emotions during the imagine task itself, their expressed emotions converge within their subsequent individual representations of the event. Finally, Manuscript 3 investigates the effects of co-imagination on divergent thinking during the imagine task. Evidence from Study 1 suggests a positive effect of co-imagination over individual imagination, which is only apparent when accounting for the negative effect of social connection—though these effects did not replicate in Study 2. Taken together, these six studies provide a novel inquiry into the features and functions of co-imagination, finding evidence to suggest a potentially influential role in how we relate to both the future, and each other. These findings have implications across diverse areas of research—providing a novel mechanism that may give rise to a state of dyadic shared reality, foster the development of imagination in children, and support therapeutic interventions in clinical contexts.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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