The warm sun on your face, a salty breeze in the air, the sound of waves crashing. Your friend suggests surfing lessons, and you both laugh, picturing yourselves clumsily tumbling in the water. Could imagining this beachside adventure bring you closer, even before packing your bags? Is the act of imagining a shared future together a step toward creating one?
From friendships to romantic relationships, people often collaborate to imagine shared experiences. These can range from playful daydreams to practical plans like dinner, or even discussions on important matters like politics or the future of the planet. Despite this, social scientists have typically explored imagination as an individual mental process.
Co-creation
Research from the Imagination and Cognition Lab at the University at Albany, SUNY, delves into how imagination shapes people’s social and emotional lives. While “imagination” can refer to many concepts, their study focuses on mentally creating specific, novel, hypothetical personal experiences. To understand how imagination works in social interactions, the researchers introduced the concept of collaborative imagination, or what they call co-imagination. This framework views imagination as an interactive, co-creative process between two or more people, where they work together to construct a shared vision of a possible experience.
The researchers set out to explore how collaboratively imagining a shared future could influence relationships. On an individual level, the ability to imagine the future plays a vital role in navigating social dynamics—helping with preparation for job interviews, first dates, or family reunions. These future projections foster social bonding, empathy, and decision-making.
Though previous research has shown how imagined experiences can affect people’s social lives, it mainly focused on individuals or social collectives. This study, however, examined how imagination happens within interpersonal interactions. The authors wanted to see how collaborative imagination affects feelings of closeness, so they conducted an experiment where strangers were paired up to imagine and describe a realistic, positive future event, such as a forest hike or a restaurant dinner. They were asked to provide details like the location, time, activities, and their emotions.
Collaborative imagination
To compare the effects of collaborative imagination, other participants either completed a non-imagination task together (like assembling a puzzle) or imagined a future experience independently with their assigned partner. Afterward, all participants answered questions about how close and connected they felt with their partner.
The findings showed that people who imagined a shared future together felt more connected than those who either independently imagined or collaborated on an unrelated task. This suggests that collaborative imagination helps foster deeper connections by co-creating potential shared experiences.
The researchers also explored whether co-imagining a future might help people develop similar visions of what that future could be. Using natural language processing tools, they analyzed the similarity between the narratives partners provided about their co-imagined future. The study found that people who collaboratively imagined shared experiences produced similar narratives, suggesting that co-imagination helps create a shared understanding of future possibilities.
This research offers the first experimental evidence that imagining the future isn’t always a solitary activity. Instead, people can co-create a shared vision, growing closer and more connected as they imagine the future together.
