Identity, Narrative, and Cultural-Historical Context in Evaluating Personal and Public Events

In this commentary, we suggest that a model explaining the dissociation between the evaluation of personal and public past and future events proposed by Liu and Szpunar (2023) might profit from considering more systematically the cultural-historical context of selecting and evaluating events. This would entail identifying psychological mechanisms which, in combination with contextual variation, predict the proposed dissociation or other evaluative configurations. We suggest combining self-enhancement with independent versus interdependent self-construal and current historical state of affairs to explain the evaluation of events. Second, we argue that taking into account the narrative context of events not only in theory but also methodologically might render the model more powerful. We point to intersections between individual life narratives and collective histories of nations and highlight their differences in scriptedness. These additional considerations may contribute to explaining different appraisals of personal and national events.