For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intriguing concept of how we perceive and prepare for the future.
What do you expect to be doing in five seconds? Five months? Five decades? Thinking about the future is a form of mental time travel at which humans are uniquely skilled. Psychologists call it prospection or future-mindedness, and some have argued it offers an invaluable framework for understanding topics ranging from perception, cognition, imagination, and memory to free will and consciousness itself. In a 2013 paper — later expanded into the book Homo Prospectus — University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman and co-authors Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada suggest that prospection is “a core organizing principle of animal and human behavior” offering a framework for understanding much of psychology. In their view, psychologists have tended to focus on how people’s memories of past events affect their current mental states. But doing so meant that research had neglected the extent to which our expectations for the future affect our present experiences and actions. In 2014, with financial support from the John Templeton Foundation, Seligman and his co-authors oversaw the distribution of $2.3 million in grants across 18 research projects designed to significantly increase our understanding of what prospection is and how it functions. Recently, the Templeton Foundation commissioned an independent white paper to analyze the results of this research alongside other work on future-mindedness, bringing together insights from a total of 167 works. The current state of prospection research demonstrates that the ways we think and talk about the future has significant and sometimes counterintuitive effects on the ways we think, feel, and behave in the present.