Flourishing and How We Process Our Past and Future Selves

Goal

Human lives are 'temporally extended'. We care not just about our current self, but also our past and future selves. We reason prudentially about what to do, and when to do it, in order to better the lives of our future selves. Our preferences themselves have a temporal structure: we have preferences about where in time events occur. For instance, we tend to prefer that pleasant events happen in our near future (rather than in our past or in our far future), and insofar as unpleasant events must occur, we prefer them in our past.
The goal is to generate new, cross-disciplinary research probing the connections between prudential reasoning and the temporal structure our preferences, on the one hand, and the way we think about, represent and experience time, on the other. By doing so we can better answer questions such as: 'why do we often fail to plan properly for our future selves?' 'why do we often prioritise our near-future selves over our far-future selves?' 'why do we prefer that our lives contain more pain, as long as it is our past selves who are suffering?' and 'how can we provide better tools for reasoning about our future selves?'

Opportunity

Psychologists and economists have demonstrated numerous ways in which our prudential reasoning about our future selves is suboptimal and prone to various biases. There is also research into the ways we represent and experience time itself. This new research would identify the connections between these research areas. Phase-one would experimentally investigate the hypothesis that our representation and experience of time partially explain the temporal structure of our preferences and the biases in our prudential reasoning. Phase-two would investigate which ways of intervening on the former can make significant and long-term changes for the better, to the latter.

Roadblocks

There are two main challenges. In Phase-one the primary difficulty is effectively operationalising the different aspects of our conceptualisation and experience of time. This is necessary to experimentally probe which of these aspects modulate the temporal structure of our preferences or the biases in our prudential reasoning.
In phase-two the primary difficulty is finding ways to use the knowledge we gain about these connections to develop efficacious ways to intervene on our conceptualisation and experience of time–which may be quite inflexible–in order to update the temporal structure of our preferences and improve our prudential reasoning.

Breakthroughs Needed

Building on the beginnings of new research in this area, we can use conceptual distinctions and insights from the philosophical investigation of time, and our experience of time, and from psychological research into the ways we represent time in language and gesture, to inform experimental design and overcome the first main roadblock.
Recent interdisciplinary work at the intersection of psychology, economics and philosophy has proved highly successful, and will serve as a model for this work. Research leaders in these areas should come together to develop ways to test hypotheses, running pilot studies to evaluate various ways of operationalising the relevant aspects of our conceptualisation and experience of time. Interdisciplinary collaboration will be key here, and The Foundation should provide clear guidance on the nature of these collaborations. To be successful, the funding should depend on collaborators bringing complementary skills and knowledge to the proposal.
Ways of overcoming the second challenge can be developed as part of this same collaboration. These can then be tested and compared through the use of longitudinal studies that track whether certain interventions are efficacious in changing the structure of people's preferences or the ways they reason about their future.

Key Indicators of Success

3 years: Can the interdisciplinary collaborations come up with ways of operationalising and testing a range of fine-grained predictions relevant to phase-one?
5 years: Can collaborators find ways to implement phase-two interventions, and test their efficacy?
10 years: Have the interventions that collaborators have suggested and successfully piloted been shown to be robust over longer time periods, and to have real-world impact on people's preference structures and prudential reasoning?

Additional Information

References
https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2019.1703017
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-020-02791-0
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02749-2
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02159.x
https://doi.org/10.1086/680910

Collaborators
Eugene Caruso (UCLA)
Christoph Hoerl (Warwick)
Theresa McCormack (Queens)
Preston Greene (NUS)
Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame)
Ruth Lee (York)