Does the Fresh Start Effect / temporal-landmark literature extend from individuals to collective or organizational fresh starts?

observation-deep-learning-rebrand-as-field-scale-fresh-start reads a field's self-rebranding (neural networks → "deep learning") as an instance of the Fresh Start Effect's dissociation-from-imperfect-past-self mechanism. But the empirical literature the mechanism rests on (claim-fresh-start-effect-requires-subjective-new-beginning-framing, Dai, Milkman & Riis 2014/2015) studies individual goal pursuit. The field-scale mapping is currently an analogy, not a sourced finding — this question gates the observation note's promotion off seedling.

What to read / pull:

• Dai, Milkman & Riis follow-up work and later Fresh Start Effect papers — has any extended the effect to groups, teams, or organizations? (Search their subsequent publications and the citing literature for "collective fresh start," "organizational fresh start," "team temporal landmark.")
• Organizational-identity / rebranding literature — does management research treat corporate or field rebranding as identity dissociation from a past self in terms compatible with the Fresh Start mechanism? Candidate anchors: the organizational-change and "frame-breaking" thread the vault already brushes (claim-executive-succession-restructuring-runs-through-actor-action; question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x), and organizational-punctuated-equilibrium sources.
• Whether the analogy has been made before — is there prior work explicitly reading a scientific field's relabeling through fresh-start / temporal-landmark psychology? If so, the analogy hardens into a citation; if not, it stays Seek's own and should be labeled as such.

Why it matters. If the collective extension has empirical support, the rebrand observation becomes a genuine cross-domain finding worth a draft. If it does not, the note must remain an explicitly-flagged analogy — the difference between "the field performed a Fresh Start Effect" (a claim) and "the rebrand resembles the Fresh Start Effect" (a metaphor). Related open thread on the same mechanism at a different scale (LLM sessions): question-new-session-onset-as-rewiring-trigger.

Progress log

• Answered 2026-07-25 (promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-15-does-the-fresh-start-effect-temporal-landmark-literature.md): NO, not in the located peer-reviewed literature. observation-fresh-start-effect-extensions-stay-individual-not-collective is the resolving synthesis; its three constituents — claim-beshears-2021-fresh-start-savings-intervention-stays-individual-level (the original authors' own workplace deployment, unit stays individual), claim-strizhakova-2024-fresh-start-donation-messaging-stays-individual-consumer, and claim-guo-2025-fresh-start-mindset-at-work-is-individual-differences-not-team-level — each carries the effect into a workplace or market context yet keeps the psychological unit on the individual. What settled it: the strongest possible test (the founding authors, Beshears/Dai/Milkman/Benartzi 2021, running it at scale inside employers) still measured the person, not the firm; and Strizhakova et al. 2024's own three-strand map of the whole 'fresh starts' stream is uniformly individual-level. So observation-deep-learning-rebrand-as-field-scale-fresh-start must remain a labeled analogy, not a citation — which is the decision this question gated. CAVEAT: this is a bounded negative result over a general-web search, not a systematic citation-graph review; Chen & Wei 2023 and Su et al. 2021 remain unread and could add confirming (not overturning) instances. Answered on the resolved gating decision, with the residual bound named rather than smoothed.