Future self

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In the psychology of self, the future self concerns the processes and consequences associated with thinking about oneself in the future. People think about their future selves similarly to how they think about other people. [1] [2] [3] [4] The extent to which people feel psychologically connected (e.g., similarity, closeness) to their future self influences how well they treat their future self. [5] When people feel connected to their future self, they are more likely to save for retirement, make healthy decisions, and avoid ethical transgressions. [6] Interventions that increase feelings of connectedness with future selves can improve future-oriented decision making across these domains. [7]

Contents

Philosophical foundations

Derek Parfit influenced the psychological research on the future self. Derek Parfit at Harvard-April 21, 2015-Effective Altruism (cropped).jpg
Derek Parfit influenced the psychological research on the future self.

Psychological research on the future self often attributes its theoretical foundations to the philosopher Derek Parfit. Parfit argued that people might differ in the extent to which they feel similar and connected to themselves in the future. [8] [9] Under Parfit's conceptualization, people act rationally by basing their concern for their future on the degree of connectedness between present and future selves. According to Parfit, it is rational for people who perceive very little connectedness with their future self to act in ways that neglect the future self (e.g., by smoking).

The psychological work that followed did not similarly argue for Parfit's normative view but has instead attempted to test the descriptive validity of Parfit's theory. [6]

Psychological theory

Social psychological and neurological evidence suggests that people think about themselves in the future similarly to how they think about other people. [1] [2] [3] [10] [11] Just as feeling close to others increases prosocial giving, [12] feeling close to one's future self motivates people to delay present gratification in order to benefit themselves in the future. [5] [6]

Measuring psychological connectedness

Shane Frederick initially tested whether the degree of connectedness with the future self is associated with less discounting of future benefits (in dollar amounts and time). [13] Asking subjects how similar they felt to their future selves on a 1-100 scale, Frederick did not find a statistically significant relationship between the degree of connectedness and discounting of future benefits. [13] However, later researchers argued Frederick did not find a connection because of the way he measured connectedness.

In 2009, Hal Hershfield and colleagues introduced a new measurement of psychological connectedness by adapting the Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale, [14] where the relationship between present and future selves is depicted with seven pairs of successively overlapping circles. [15] Using this measurement, Hershfield, [16] as well as Daniel Bartels and Oleg Urminsky, [17] [18] [19] have now demonstrated a robust relationship between psychological connectedness and discount rates. The more psychologically connectedness people feel between present and future selves, the more they care about the future, and the more they discount present benefits.

Manipulating psychological connectedness

The research that followed showed systematic ways to enhance psychological connectedness. Experiments have manipulated connectedness by having participants:

  1. Interact with a visual depiction of their future self (increased connectedness) [7]
  2. List ways in which they expect to be similar to themselves in the future (increased connectedness) [7]
  3. Expect an upcoming event (e.g., college graduation) to fundamentally change who they are (decreased connectedness) [17]

The randomized experiments revealed a causal relationship between feeling connected to one's future self and subsequently making more patient long-term decisions. [6]

Policy applications

Finances

In one of the first experiments to enhance psychological connectedness with the future self, participants were given immersive virtual reality technology and instructed to look at themselves in a virtual mirror. [16] The experimenters randomized whether participants saw an age-progressed version of themselves (meant to look approximately 70 years old) or a current-aged self. Participants that interacted with their future self were more likely to delay present monetary rewards and indicated greater intentions to save for retirement. Leveraging the insights from this experiment, firms such as Merrill Lynch have since adopted web applications with age-progressing software in order to increase retirement savings. [20]

The finding has been conceptually replicated with multiple diverse samples. In one field experiment, students from economically diverse backgrounds that had weekly interactions with an avatar of their future self demonstrated heightened performance during a financial education course. [21] A team of researchers, in collaboration with Ideas42, launched another replication with thousands of Mexican citizens. Before deciding whether to sign-up for an automatic savings account, the treatment group was asked to spend time vividly imagining their lives in the distant future. Compared to a 1% take up rate in the control condition, 3% of people in the treatment condition enrolled in the automatic savings account. [7]

The effect of psychological connectedness on financial decision making is moderated by knowledge about future outcomes. [19] When people are unaware of their future financial needs, regardless of how connected they feel, they are unlikely to save for the future. Similarly, people that have full information about the consequences of their financial actions will only save if they also feel connectedness with their future self. The researchers argue that policy makers who provide information to consumers on retirement savings should also consider simultaneously enhancing psychological connectedness. People are most likely to save rather than spend when they are knowledgeable about the outcomes of their decisions and feel connected to their future selves.

In 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau included a measure of psychological connectedness to the future self in its first Financial Wellbeing Survey. [22]

Health

Applying the existing theory, researchers hypothesized that increasing feelings of connectedness with the future self should cause people to make healthier dieting and exercising decisions. [23] Correlational evidence suggests that feeling psychologically connected to the future self corresponds with greater self-reported health. In randomized experiments, participants that wrote in detail about a distant future self were more likely to exercise in the days following the intervention.

Ethicality

People engage in ethically dubious behavior because they tend to neglect the potential future consequences of their behavior, but feeling connected to one's future self should lead them to discount the future less and thus avoid ethical transgressions. [24] Experiments have found that assigning participants to write about their future selves can decrease support for unethical negotiation strategies. [24] In another set of experiments, after interacting with a 40-year old version of themselves in immersive virtual reality, college students were less likely to cheat on a following task. [25] In a field experiment in the Netherlands, high schoolers that received texts from an avatar of their future self were less likely to engage in delinquent and anti-social behavior.

Possible selves

Future selves are specific ideas about who one might become in the future. Possibles selves include the ideal selves people hope to become, other selves who people could become, and selves people are afraid of becoming. Future selves can serve as a roadmap to guide individuals from where they are in the present to where they imagine being in the future. [26]

However, in cognitive psychology, the future self is one type of a broader concept called 'possible selves'. These possible selves are psychological schema representing multiple alternative versions of the self, encompassing past and future selves that together characterise regrets, doubts, hopes, worries, and fantasies about who we may have been previously and who we may become. [27] [28] [29]

The way individuals envision their possible selves influences their behaviour and its outcomes. For example, when the future selves of a subject are indicative of unattainable fantasies, rather than reasonable expectations, effort and performance are lower across educational, dating, and medical contexts. [30]

Identifying and exploring their possible selves with a therapist is one strategy by which clients pursue positive cognitive, emotional, and behavioural change in psychotherapy. [31] An example of a technique that endeavours to facilitate this exploration can be seen in the work of British psychotherapist Paul Newham, who encourages clients to use creative writing and dramatic characterisation to express and personify past and future selves, in order to subsequently interpret their psychological significance. [32] [33] [34]

Want-should conflicts

Want-should conflicts refer to internal conflicts between one's wantself and one's should self. [35] The theory assumes people simultaneously hold two sets of preferences; one associated with their want self (i.e., present-focused, hedonistic) and one associated with their should self (i.e., future-focused, utilitarian). Interventions that seek to increase patient decision making, for example, can use commitment devices to ensure people act on their should preferences and avoid succumbing to their want preferences. [36]

Delayed gratification

Enhancing psychological connectedness to the future self can improve ability to delay gratification. Walter Mischel devoted a chapter to the future self in his book, The Marshmallow Test. [37]

See also

Related Research Articles

Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive bias</span> Systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.

In philosophy, the self is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes.

In economics, time preference is the current relative valuation placed on receiving a good or some cash at an earlier date compared with receiving it at a later date.

In the psychology of self, one's self-concept is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question "Who am I?".

In economics, hyperbolic discounting is a time-inconsistent model of delay discounting. It is one of the cornerstones of behavioral economics and its brain-basis is actively being studied by neuroeconomics researchers.

Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.

In economics, dynamic inconsistency or time inconsistency is a situation in which a decision-maker's preferences change over time in such a way that a preference can become inconsistent at another point in time. This can be thought of as there being many different "selves" within decision makers, with each "self" representing the decision-maker at a different point in time; the inconsistency occurs when not all preferences are aligned.

Daniel G. Goldstein is an American cognitive psychologist known for the specification and testing of heuristics and models of bounded rationality in the field of judgment and decision making. He is an honorary research fellow at London Business School and works with Microsoft Research as a principal researcher.

Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.

Confidence is the feeling of belief or trust that a person or thing is reliable. Self-confidence is trust in oneself. Self-confidence involves a positive belief that one can generally accomplish what one wishes to do in the future. Self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem, which is an evaluation of one's worth. Self-confidence is related to self-efficacy—belief in one's ability to accomplish a specific task or goal. Confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those without it may fail because they lack it, and those with it may succeed because they have it rather than because of an innate ability or skill.

The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. Overconfidence is one example of a miscalibration of subjective probabilities. Throughout the research literature, overconfidence has been defined in three distinct ways: (1) overestimation of one's actual performance; (2) overplacement of one's performance relative to others; and (3) overprecision in expressing unwarranted certainty in the accuracy of one's beliefs.

Ego depletion is the controversial idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion. In particular, experiencing a state of ego depletion impairs the ability to control oneself later on. A depleting task requiring self-control can have a hindering effect on a subsequent self-control task, even if the tasks are seemingly unrelated. Self-control plays a valuable role in the functioning of the self on both individualistic and interpersonal levels. Ego depletion is therefore a critical topic in experimental psychology, specifically social psychology, because it is a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the processes of human self-control. There have both been studies to support and to question the validity of ego-depletion as a theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impulsivity</span> Tendency to act on a whim without considering consequences

In psychology, impulsivity is a tendency to act on a whim, displaying behavior characterized by little or no forethought, reflection, or consideration of the consequences. Impulsive actions are typically "poorly conceived, prematurely expressed, unduly risky, or inappropriate to the situation that often result in undesirable consequences," which imperil long-term goals and strategies for success. Impulsivity can be classified as a multifactorial construct. A functional variety of impulsivity has also been suggested, which involves action without much forethought in appropriate situations that can and does result in desirable consequences. "When such actions have positive outcomes, they tend not to be seen as signs of impulsivity, but as indicators of boldness, quickness, spontaneity, courageousness, or unconventionality." Thus, the construct of impulsivity includes at least two independent components: first, acting without an appropriate amount of deliberation, which may or may not be functional; and second, choosing short-term gains over long-term ones.

Construal level theory (CLT) is a theory in social psychology that describes the relation between psychological distance and the extent to which people's thinking is abstract or concrete. The core idea of CLT is that the more distant an object is from the individual, the more abstract it will be thought of, while the closer the object is, the more concretely it will be thought of. In CLT, psychological distance is defined on several dimensions—temporal, spatial, social and hypothetical distance being considered most important, though there is some debate among social psychologists about further dimensions like informational, experiential or affective distance. The theory was developed by the Israeli social psychologists Nira Liberman and the American psychologist Yaacov Trope.

In psychology, prospection is the generation and evaluation of mental representations of possible futures. The term therefore captures a wide array of future-oriented psychological phenomena, including the prediction of future emotion, the imagination of future scenarios, and planning. Prospection is central to various aspects of human cognition and motivation. Daniel Gilbert (psychologist) and Timothy Wilson coined the term in 2007. It has since become a central area of enquiry in the cognitive sciences.

Debiasing is the reduction of bias, particularly with respect to judgment and decision making. Biased judgment and decision making is that which systematically deviates from the prescriptions of objective standards such as facts, logic, and rational behavior or prescriptive norms. Biased judgment and decision making exists in consequential domains such as medicine, law, policy, and business, as well as in everyday life. Investors, for example, tend to hold onto falling stocks too long and sell rising stocks too quickly. Employers exhibit considerable discrimination in hiring and employment practices, and some parents continue to believe that vaccinations cause autism despite knowing that this link is based on falsified evidence. At an individual level, people who exhibit less decision bias have more intact social environments, reduced risk of alcohol and drug use, lower childhood delinquency rates, and superior planning and problem solving abilities.

In psychology and related fields, future orientation is broadly defined as the extent to which an individual thinks about the future, anticipates future consequences, and plans ahead before acting. Across development, future orientation is particularly important during periods of major changes, for example during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, when youth must make choices about social groups, academic paths, as well as risky behaviors like drug and alcohol use, and sexual activity. Several models have been developed to describe the various factors that combine to impact future orientation.

Gretchen Chapman is a cognitive psychologist known for her work on judgment and decision making in health-related contexts, such as clinical decision making and patient preferences, preventive health behavior, and vaccination. She is Professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Chapman served as an Editor of the journal Psychological Science and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

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