Dr. Brendan Bo O’Connor is a cognitive scientist, scholar of imagination, outsider artist and game designer. He is an associate professor and director of the Imagination Lab at the University at Albany, SUNY. His scientific research draws on psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to investigate the role of imagination and future thinking in empathy, social connection, morality, and collective cognition. His art and games explore these themes in practice. Realizing new possibilities, in part, requires new partnerships. If you would like to see more work on co-imagination, please reach out to bboconnor@albany.edu on ways to partner with the lab and support new insights.
A post by Brendan Bo O’Connor
Our future is not a foregone conclusion. It’s actively constructed at the horizon of the present. In a moment when the world feels divisive and isolating, I’d like to share some recent research from my lab that highlights the power of imagining a future together, what we are calling collaborative imagination or co-imagination.
This research advances a framework for studying imagination as a socially creative act, an interactive, interpersonal process in which two or more people dynamically converse to co-create shared representations of hypothetical events, creating new connections and new possibilities of what could be.
From aging lovers to people on a first date, from best friends to new acquaintances, collaborating to imagine shared experiences appears fundamental to human relationships. These imaginings can be as whimsical as make-believe, as mundane as what’s for dinner, or as consequential as the future of our politics and planet.
How might co-imagination transform and strengthen our relationships in the present? Is co-imagining a shared future the first step toward creating one?
Philosophers and sociologists alike have conceptualized how populations have collective imaginations, or shared beliefs and understandings of future possibilities (Benjamin, 2024; Borer, 2010; Moody-Adams, 2022; Taylor, 2004; Williamson, 2024; see related Junkyard posts, here and here). This emphasis on imagination as a group-level phenomenon is related to work in psychology, which has studied how individuals imagine a future of a social group such as one’s family, community, or even country (Szpunar & Szpunar 2016; Liu & Szpunar, 2023). However, prior research has almost exclusively studied the minds and brains of individuals imagining the future on their own, largely overlooking that when people imagine the future, it is not merely a social representation but social action.
The first set of studies on co-imagination were led by Zoë Fowler in my lab and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Fowler et al., 2024); we set out to empirically investigate for the first time imagination as an interpersonal process in which two or more people actively create shared representations of future events. Teaming up with our international colleagues Daniela Palombo and Christopher Madan on the project, we were particularly interested to see how imagining a shared future with someone else might influence feelings of closeness and connection in newly acquainted relationships, as well as how co-imagination shapes the phenomenology and content of what is imagined.
We paired strangers to complete a collaborative imagination task. They needed to work together to imagine and narrate shared future experiences that could occur—such as hiking in the forest. We asked for details, including where and when the event will occur, what people will do, what they will think, and how they will feel.
To rule out alternative possible explanations for effects of collaboration in general or independently imagining a shared future for the same event cue, we had other participants complete alternative tasks for comparison. One group of participants paired up to collaborate on interactive perception tasks that didn’t involve imagination, such as working on a puzzle or working together to narrate details presented in a photo. Another group of participants each worked independently to imagine a future experience shared with their assigned partner (e.g., each partner imagined going on a hike with the other partner, but critically they did not interact to co-create the imagined event together).
We recorded the narratives people generated across conditions and analyzed them using natural language processing. After completing a given task, all participants answered questions about the phenomenology of what they imagined as well as how close and connected they felt with their study partner.
We observed three main effects of co-imagination that I think are particularly important to draw your attention to. First, we found that people who co-imagined a shared future synchronized narratives of future events across individuals (compared to imagining the future independently or collaborating on a perception task). That is, people who co-imagined created more similar narratives about what would happen in the future, suggesting that co-imagination may be a way for people to co-create a shared understanding of possible future experiences. Second, we found that people who co-imagined reported higher imagery vividness, suggesting that co-imagination heightens the phenomenology of how the imagined future is subjectively experienced.
Finally, we found that co-imagination facilitated social connection, increasing feelings of closeness between the people who were imagining a shared future together compared to the other tasks. These findings begin to reveal how co-imagination may enable people to begin to build new connections and community by actively imagining shared experiences of possible futures together.
In a forthcoming article, we further analyzed the imagined narratives from this data set using new computational tools to code for changes in emotions (e.g., excitement, fear, sadness, nervousness, gratitude, optimism, etc.) that people express while they are imagining (Fowler et al., 2025). Co-imagination synchronized the emotions that people shared about imagined future events compared to the independent imagination task. Fascinatingly, this emotional convergence does not simply appear the result of parroting one another’s emotions in real time while co-imagining. Instead, this emotional converge appears to occur after the fact as people are updating their imagined representations of the future to include the thoughts and feelings that their partners was initially expressing.
While our work on co-imagination has begun to shed light on the social nature and structure of imagination, it also raises several new and intriguing questions. We are excited to share these initial findings with The Junkyard community, and philosophers more broadly, as we hope to open an interdisciplinary dialogue that spurs new avenues of inquiry to explore the normative and epistemological implications of co-imagination.
What functions does co-imagination have in existing close relationships and how does this relate to normative relational obligations for each other’s welfare? Co-imagining a shared future seems to be a part of everyday life with those you are closest to, from friends and family to romantic partners. Indeed, we suspect it might be important in both forming and maintaining close and caring relationships across time. Future research could explore, for example, the importance of co-imagination in fostering close relationships with social and moral commitments using longitudinal designs.
The evidence we have so far demonstrates that co-imagination can increase feelings of closeness among people who were previously strangers and give rise to a shared understanding of what the future could look like. But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done to understand just how co-imagination supports and shapes close relationships. Studying more people, across different relationship types and populations, over prolonged periods of time will better enable us to understand how co-imagination operates within close relationships which may include normative duties to imagine and plan for future events together (Jansen, 2017; Michaelian and Sutton, 2019; Szanto, 2017).
Juxtaposing our framework on co-imagination with ideas in philosophy and sociology on collective imagination that ponders how collective beliefs about the future may form at the group-level across a population (Benjamin, 2024; Borer, 2010; Moody-Adams, 2022; Taylor, 2004; Williamson, 2024) highlights an intriguing gap in knowledge: How does the act of co-imagining give rise to shared representations of collective imagination? At present, our studies focused on co-imagination as it unfolds between two people imagining their shared future. But the futures that people imagine can be much larger in scale, encompassing a broader social circle such as one’s extended family or even all of humanity. So, how does co-imagination shape and give rise to collective beliefs, knowledge, and emotions about the future at the group level? And what are the implications for societal cohesion and collective action?
Lastly, while our empirical work points to the importance of forming a shared representation about the future that transcends any one individual’s imagination, we appreciate the perspective raised by philosophers (Huebner 2018; Walton 1991) and other scholars in the humanities (Finn et al., 2023) that points to the potential flexible advantages of imagining together with others who have different expertise, identities, and cultural backgrounds. A diverse group may foster a collective imagination with wider ranging possibilities than a collective imagination arising from a more homogenized group with a more narrow set of experiences, knowledge, and beliefs to draw from (see also advantageous of transactive future thought raised by Michaelian & Sutton, 2016).
Addressing these big questions and beyond will require new knowledge and teams of interdisciplinary efforts from philosophy, sociology, psychology, and the creative arts working in concert to better understand, in-theory and in-practice, how and why imagination is a socially creative process.
The future—the hopes, dreams, and challenges it may bring—is not ours alone to imagine. The future and its possibilities are something that we actively imagine together, and in doing so, we become closer and more connected to one another in the present. It’s up to you, up to us, to imagine where we go from here.
References
Benjamin, R. (2024). Imagination: A manifesto (a Norton short). WW Norton & Company.
Borer, M. I. (2010). From collective memory to collective imagination: Time, place, and urban redevelopment. Symbolic Interaction, 33(1), 96-114.
Fowler, Z., Palombo, D.J., Madan, C.R., & O’Connor, B.B. (2024). Collaborative imagination synchronizes representations of the future and fosters social connection in the present, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (25) e2318292121.
Fowler, Z., Law, K. F., Srivastava, A., Oveis, C., Bontkes, O., Palombo, D., & O'Connor, B. B. (2025). Co-imagination fosters shared emotions of future experiences. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cwmev_v2
Finn, E., Torrejon Capurro, C., Bennett, M. G., & Wylie, R. (2023). Applied imagination. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1275942.
Huebner, B. (2018). Planning and Prefigurative Politics. The Nature of Freedom and the Possibility of Control. In B. Huebner (Ed.), The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 296–329.
Jansen, J. 2017. Shared Imagining: Beyond Extension, Distribution and Commitment. In Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. by Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, and Luca Vanzago. London, New York: Routledge.
Liu, J. H., & Szpunar, K. K. (2023). Structure and dynamics of personal and national event cognition. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 12(1), 1.
Michaelian, K., & Sutton, J. (2019). Collective mental time travel: Remembering the past and imagining the future together. Synthese, 196(12), 4933-4960.
Moody-Adams, M. (2022). Making Space for Justice Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. New York, NY, USA: Columbia University Press.
Szanto, T. 2017. Collective Imagination. A Normative Account. In Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. by Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, and Luca Vanzago, 223–245. London, New York: Routledge.
Szpunar, P. M., & Szpunar, K. K. (2016). Collective future thought: Concept, function, and implications for collective memory studies. Memory Studies, 9(4), 376-389.
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Walton, K. L. 1991. Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Williamson, T. (2024). Collective imagining. In Imagination and Experience (pp. 388-406). Routledge.