Future States of Mind Empower (Sifting and Winnowing the Why Provides the How)

Study: Future Seems More Real To People Who Feel Powerful

by DAVID BERREBY

MARCH 11, 2013, 2:53 PM

Are smokers, non-exercisers, non-savers and other such undisciplined people acting irrationally? The conventional wisdom of our decade says yes, of course, they are. That's why we need policies that will help people overcome the mind's biases toward error. Not so fast, say a number of dissenters. The conventional wisdom is created by researchers, policymakers, politicians and other successful people, for whom a future-oriented self-discipline is self-evidently good. If the future is a foreign country for all of us, theirs is Tuscany. But for many people, 2032 looks more like Somalia. With a crappy life and no hope of improvement, perhaps it is rational to use tobacco, order fries every night, spend the whole paycheck, or retire as soon as possible, finances be damned. I'm sympathetic to that side of the argument, but now this paper, from last months Psychological Science, has me thinking both sides may be wrong. It reports a series of experiments in which people valued the future more when they felt personally more powerful. That suggests that no one—neither non-smoking savers nor live-for-now spendthrifts—acts rational about the future. Instead, it may be that people's view of tomorrow may be a response to feelings about how much control they have over their lives today.

"Temporal discounting"—a commitment to your present needs and desires over those of your future self—is often cited as an example of human behavior diverging from the rational calculations of classical economic models. If you're in okay health and not too old, the odds are good that you will still be alive in a year or 5 or 10. Therefore if you are rational you should be willing to pay small costs today in order to get bigger gains in that future. The classic example is a choice between $100 today and $125 in a year. Most people who can afford to contemplate the problem are not so desperate for the c-note, so their better choice is to make an easy $25 by waiting. Yet when they answer this question most respondents go for the instant payoff, note the new paper's authors, Priyanka D. Joshi and Nathanael J. Fast of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

Naturally, then, some recent research (for example, this) has aimed to counteract this feeling of alienation from the future self.