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In reviewing psychological studies, �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven and colleagues find that people prioritize thinking about the future over the past

Although time travel has typically been the domain of science fiction, whenever you take a moment to remember the past or imagine the future in detail, you are in a sense travelling through time. In psychology, these processes are called retrospection and prospection. Retrospection is thinking about and creating mental representations of the past, while prospection is the same thing but for the future.

Some work in the field of psychology has suggested that retrospection and prospection are functionally interchangeable, but intuitively, they seem to be very different. After in a recently published paper, , a �鶹��Ѱ����� professor and department chair of psychology and neuroscience, along with research colleagues Eugene Caruso and Sam Maglio, finds that people think about the past and future differently because of several assumptions that people make about the nature of time (referred to as temporal axioms in the paper), and that people prioritize thinking about the future—a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

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�鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven, department chair of psychology and neuroscience, finds that people prioritize thinking about the future—a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

Temporal axioms

The assumptions people make about time are called temporal axioms because they relate to time (temporal) and are self-evident (the primary definition of an axiom). There are some philosophies of time that disagree with the axioms; for example, block time theory argues that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously, like different places except separated by time instead of space. However, even if such philosophies are true, the axioms remain valid premises because they describe not only people’s perception of time but also their subjective experiences of the world.The authors propose three temporal axioms—one of direction, one of uncertainty and one of control.

The axiom of direction describes the way all things move through time. Specifically, everything moves only from past to future, with the reverse being—as far as humans know—impossible. For example, if you blow up a balloon with air and then open the end, not only will the air always come out, but it will also be impossible to get the air back in; the balloon can be re-inflated, but it won’t revert it to its original state because it will be filled with different air. In physics, this reality is called entropy, a term for the tendency of all things to progress from states of order to disorder (the collected air disperses) or high energy to low energy (the relatively high pressure inside the balloon is relieved). Entropy defines the direction of time.

The axiom of uncertainty details that as uncertain as people may be about the past, there is at least some information about it, whether in the form of memory or history. Meanwhile, to the extent that the future is known at all, it is because of inference based on information from the past. Therefore, even if people could make predictions with 100% certainty, the uncertainty about the future would be at least as great as the uncertainty about the past, and in reality, it is always greater because people cannot make perfect predictions. “There are always different possibilities for any point in the future,” Van Boven explains, “and there are not different possibilities that actually exist in the past. There were many possibilities, but one of them did happen.”

The axiom of control describes how, because time has direction, the future is more uncertain than the past. This uncertainty creates a sense of control—of being able to choose between different possibilities by acting differently. While there are arguments against people having control over the future, people tend to view the future as more controllable than the past because of its relative uncertainty. Relatedly, according to Van Boven, “people don’t think of themselves as having control over their interpretation of the past, which presents its own set of challenges about how we make sense of what has happened in our lives.”

Prioritizing proception

The way that people think about the future and past is often understood in terms of psychological distance, which is just what it sounds like: how removed a person feels from an event, whether it is in the future or past. “There are many theories of psychological distance,” Van Boven says, “and within social psychology, one of the more prominent theories is Construal Level Theory, which is the idea that when things are in the distant future, they are interpreted on a more abstract level, whereas when they are in the very near future, we tend to think of them more concretely.”

This principle is fairly intuitive. For example, when you are given an assignment, it may not even feel real until the due date rolls around. However, although people think more concretely and feel more strongly about an event three days in the future than one three weeks in the future, they don’t necessarily think and feel the same about an event three days in the future as one three days in the past. In fact, Van Boven and his colleagues found in their review that people do not.

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People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next, says �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven.

“When things are in the future,” Van Boven says, “our affective system is highly engaged. As soon as things move into the past, the affective system and our emotional reactions subside.

“A classic example would be, if you have an upcoming presentation, your emotional system will get really jacked up as it’s getting close, and then as soon as it has passed, even if it is still objectively close in time, the affective system down-regulates itself. The same is true with attention.” People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next.

The underestimation of proception

One question the review raises is why the prioritization of proception isn’t an established psychological principle when research in the field often involves people thinking about real or hypothetical events, which are necessarily either in the future or the past.

“That has to do with research methods,” Van Boven says, referring to the example about the upcoming, stressful presentation: The fact that people feel more strongly about the event when it is in the future and then tend to move on shortly after it happens could be easily demonstrated in a laboratory setting, according to Van Boven. “The problem is getting a scientific understanding of what exactly is changing. There are many confounds in that event moving through time.

“When we have an upcoming presentation, we still don’t know exactly what is going to happen in that presentation. We don’t know what the room is going to be like, we don’t know what the audience is going to be like. There’s a possibility that we might bomb, and that would have negative consequences. What we do experimentally is we try to create these situations where everything is exactly the same, and the only thing that differs is whether you’re thinking of it as something that’s in the future or in the past.” This eliminates all of the temporal axioms except for direction; unlike in real life, in the lab there is no difference in uncertainty or control between past and future.

“This is kind of analogous to an active control placebo in medical research,” Van Boven explains. An active control placebo lacks the active ingredient of the actual medicine being tested but has similar non-treatment effects. This is intended to stop people from subconsciously distinguishing between the placebo and the medicine on the basis of the medicine’s expected side effects. “The carefully controlled study gives you a very precise estimate of how big the effect is for the specific medicine you’re interested in,” Van Boven says, “but that’s not how big the effect is that people experience when they take the medicine in real life, because they’re embracing the placebo effect.”

Changing tense

This review has a major implication for other research, which has to do with the necessity of taking the difference between prospection and retrospection into account, especially during studies that rely on people imagining different scenarios.

“To a large extent, researchers ignore whether things are in the future versus in the past,” Van Boven says. “It’s just that it has not historically been a dimension that people are really concerned about. So, a very common research approach is to use scenario studies.” Scenario studies involve asking people to imagine different situations, then varying those scenarios to see how it affects people’s responses to them. For example, participants could be asked to imagine two people going on a date, then to say how well it went. The scenario would vary slightly between groups of participants—for example, who paid or how the bill was split may be different in each group’s scenario—and the experiment would measure the effect of this difference on how people viewed the situation.

Often in these kinds of experiments there is an implication as to whether the event already happened or is going to happen, even just based on the verb tense used to describe the scenario, and as Van Boven says, “People have been sort of haphazard in terms of whether they present those kinds of scenarios in the future tense versus the past tense. Part of what our review and framework shows is that there may be ways in which we’re understating the effects of different scenarios when we happen to put them in the past (rather) than when we happen to put them in the future. It may be the case that the tense matters a great deal, and it’s something that we haven’t noticed because we haven’t varied that within our experimental context.”

Changing one’s focus between future and past isn’t just important in the context of research, however. “People who psychologically prioritize the future are happier and healthier than those who prioritize the past,” Van Boven says. Broadly, an orientation towards the future has been associated with positive outcomes in several areas, including financial success, health outcomes and life satisfaction. “So,” Van Boven continues, “the axioms and resulting psychological patterns are not merely oddities or biases; they help people successfully navigate through life.”

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