Prescribed journeys through life: Cultural differences in mental time travel between Middle Easterners and Scandinavians

• We examine differences in mental time travel in Scandinavians vs. Middle Easterners.
• More gender differences were found in the Middle Eastern sample.
• Middle Easterners indicate stronger influence of norms (cultural life script, religion).
• Middle Easterners show greater use of MTT to teach, inform and direct behaviour.
• Sharing events to give cultural guidance consist with adherence to normative scripts.

Mental time travel is the ability to remember past events and imagine future events. Here, 124 Middle Easterners and 128 Scandinavians generated important past and future events. These different societies present a unique opportunity to examine effects of culture. Findings indicate stronger influence of normative schemas and greater use of mental time travel to teach, inform and direct behaviour in the Middle East compared with Scandinavia. The Middle Easterners generated more events that corresponded to their cultural life script and that contained religious words, whereas the Scandinavians reported events with a more positive mood impact. Effects of gender were mainly found in the Middle East. Main effects of time orientation largely replicated recent findings showing that simulation of future and past events are not necessarily parallel processes. In accordance with the notion that future simulations rely on schema-based construction, important future events showed a higher overlap with life script events than past events in both cultures. In general, cross-cultural discrepancies were larger in future compared with past events. Notably, the high focus in the Middle East on sharing future events to give cultural guidance is consistent with the increased adherence to normative scripts found in this culture.

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