Project overview
What determines whether collective nostalgia prompts constructive or destructive actions to re-establish collective continuity? We propose that the answer resides in the content of the nostalgic memories, which are susceptible to alteration and manipulation in the name of ingroup goals (Smeekes, Verkuyten, & Poppe, 2011). The scant empirical work on collective nostalgia, however, has treated the memory content of the collective nostalgia experienced as noise. Herein, we direct attention to the signal provided by the content of collective nostalgia—a signal that can illuminate how group members want to respond to reclaim the ingroup’s collective continuity.
