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Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 76, 2025

Possible Worlds Theory: How the Imagination Transcends and Recreates Reality

  • Dacher Keltner1 and Eftychia Stamkou2
  • 1Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA; email: [email protected] 2Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Vol. 76:329-358 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 30, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

The imagination is central to human social life but undervalued worldwide and underexplored in psychology. Here, we offer Possible Worlds Theory as a synthetic theory of the imagination. We first define the imagination, mapping the mental states it touches, from dreams and hallucinations to satire and fiction. The conditions that prompt people to imagine range from trauma to physical and social deprivation, and they challenge the sense of reality, stirring a need to create possible worlds. We theorize about four cognitive operations underlying the structure of the mental states of the imagination. We then show how people embody the imagination in social behaviors such as pretense and ritual, which give rise to experiences of a special class of feelings defined by their freedom from reality. We extend Possible Worlds Theory to four domains—play, spirituality, morality, and art—and show how in flights of the imagination people create new social realities shared with others.

Keyword(s): art, imagination, morality, pretense, spirituality
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Possible Worlds Theory: How the Imagination Transcends and Recreates Reality
Annual Review of Psychology 76, 329 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-080123-102254
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