Collective nostalgia and domestic country bias

Abstract

Three experiments tested and supported the hypothesis that collective nostalgia—nostalgia that is experienced when one thinks of oneself in terms of a particular social identity or as a member of a particular group and that concerns events or objects related to this group—increases individuals’ ethnocentric preference for ingroup (compared to outgroup) products. Greek participants who recalled collective nostalgic experiences shared with other Greeks (compared to controls) evinced a highly robust preference for Greek (compared to foreign) consumer products. This preference is referred to as domestic country bias. Following a systematic replicate-and-extend strategy, we demonstrated that both idiographic and nomothetic inductions of collective nostalgia increased domestic country bias (Experiment 1), that collective nostalgia increased domestic country bias across different product categories (Experiment 2), and that collective self-esteem mediated the effect of collective nostalgia on domestic country bias and did so independently of positive affect (Experiment 3). We discuss theoretical and practical implications.

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Identifiers

ORCID for T. Wildschut: orcid.org/0000-0002-6499-5487

ORCID for C. Sedikides: orcid.org/0000-0003-4036-889X

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