Instant Futures: an experimental study of the imagination of alternative near futures thanks to science fiction

Following Vygotsky's seminal work, sociocultural psychology has developed a powerful theory of imagination, considered as a process with mutual and transformative impacts with the social world. In this paper, we focus on the imagination of the future, which is an arena of special social and political contestation. We argue for integrating experimental methods into the scientific study of the re-composition, or synthesis process, in the imagination of the future. Provoking the imagination of the future in well-structured conditions allows for intra and interpersonal comparisons, as well as for comparisons through time. We introduce an experimental task, a "protokool", inspired by the work of a French group of science fiction writers, "le collectif Zanzibar"; we also suggest a way to analyse the data collected through this "telescope into the imagination of the future" looking at a specific process of imagining the future in dystopian and utopian ways. Finally, we present some main findings from the analysis of a corpus of 186 narratives collected in a 4-year study with Bachelor students in psychology and education. We show that the process of imagining the future is asymetrical for dystopian and utopian futures. We also point at some major patterns in these imaginations of the future, and evolutions over the four years. The research has theoretical and methodological implications for the study of the imagination of the future in sociocultural psychology.