Beyond Winners and Losers: Collective Mental Time Travel Pathways Buffer Future Agency after Elections

Research on collective mental time travel has shown thematic links between past and future events, but how specific events cue past and future events in relation to sociopolitical identity remains underexplored. Connecting the collective past to the future, we primarily focused on event characteristics to identify collective mental pathways using a data-driven, bottom-up approach. We focused on the 2023 Turkish Presidential Election as a pivotal event anchoring collective memories and related future projections. Using representative in-person interviews, we asked participants to evaluate the election, recall related past and future collective events, and rate each event’s characteristics (e.g. Valence, Vividness, Agency, Importance). Our analyses identified four unique pathways of traveling to the collective past from the election night based on these ratings. The resultant pathways mapped onto sociopolitical divides in age, voting behavior, party identification, religiosity and political orientation. These pathways revealed how certain ways of thinking of the past and the future offer psychological buffers against electoral loss. Specifically, processing the election protected future individual agency, and remembering an agentic, inclusive past scaffolded future political group agency. Our findings point to shared cognitive processes behind sociopolitical divides.