Regardless of what’s in fashion in academia, however, listening to Ray
highlight prospection and reading “Navigating into the Future or Driven
by the Past” (Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013), has
made me think about behavior differently. The lecture occurred early in
the class but I think that it has been helpful to keep it in mind as the
course has continued.
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| Image source: http://www.4thgearconsulting.com/blog/future-thinking-can-change-the-game/ |
I’m drawn to highlight prospection after reflecting about how much of a role it plays in my own thinking. As an informal experiment, I tried to be mindful of what I thought about and talked about with others, and categorized the subject-matter as past- and future-focused. I didn’t keep a formal Ulysses-style record of my thoughts, but generally, I was surprised by how future-focused my thoughts were. (It’s a fun exercise; you should try it.)
Furthermore, I feel like a great deal of my personal growth and development has occurred due to future-driven thinking. I’m not the only one: in a more extreme example, a violent and aggressive prisoner who was interviewed in the Invisibilia podcast discussed how he wanted to change his personality, so he did it, presumably with the help of prospection (Spiegel, 2016). The article doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about his process, but it seems that he envisioned the person who he wanted to be and took steps to become that person. It seems like it was simply a more extreme version of what we each go through to continually improve ourselves.
Not to mention that prospective thinking has led each of us to be where we are today—literally. I think that it’s fair to say that it is the reason that we are collectively studying at the University of Michigan. Sure, I guess it’s arguable that we learned in the past that we will benefit from higher education, but it seems to me that we used prospection to imagine ourselves here and to decide that the degree (with its accompanying knowledge, professional opportunities, and so on) would be worth the cost. Considering that this process has somehow convinced each of us to spend ~$20,000-40,000 per year, it is clearly a powerful force.
A few questions:
- Do you think some environmental behaviors are more appropriate to address with prospective thinking and envisioning?
- When do you find yourself using future-based thinking most effectively to make decisions or to guide your behavior?
References:
Carmi, N., & Arnon, S. (2014). The Role of Future Orientation in Environmental Behavior: Analyzing the Relationship on the Individual and Cultural Levels. Society and Natural Resources, 27(12), 1304–1320. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2014.928393
Seligman, M. E. P., Railton, P., Baumeister, R. F., & Sripada, C. (2013). Navigating Into the Future or Driven by the Past. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 119–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612474317
Spiegel, A. (2016). Invisibilia: Is your personality fixed, or can you change who you are? Shots: Health News from NPR. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/481859662/invisibilia-is-your-personality-fixed-or-can-you-change-who-you-are
Thanks for your post, Jessica! It's really interesting, I do think much of my thinking is also prospective, though I wouldn't have classified it as such before this course.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, I think much of our education is based in this mindset-we are being trained for what we will do in the future, beyond us just deciding that the time and money we invest now will be worth it later on. We are building a foundation (of skills, knowledge, etc.) that we will then employ later in our work.
Thinking about how to bring this prospective approach out of academia and into practical and real-world settings, especially in terms of environmental behaviors is interesting. While I want to say that all environmental behaviors would benefit from a prospection approach, I think it's been difficult for interventionists to do so effectively. Dire warnings about how awful our planet will become due to climate change, deforestation, desertification, massive amounts of garbage taking over, seem to not be particularly effective. Perhaps these scenarios still seem unbelievable or far-off to people. While shorter-term prospection approaches to environmental behavior change may be less extreme (and possibly less durable), they may also be more tangible to people. Rising sea levels may be hard to imagine, but warmer winters and long hotter summers are less so. By using smaller changes people have already noticed, prospective approaches may be more effective when utilizing effects in the near (instead of farther) future.
All that being said, I'm not sure it's particular behaviors themselves that would be more appropriate for a prospection approach. Most (if not all) environmental behaviors can be framed in this way, it is just important that the changes or effects from this behavior seem realistic to people.
Jessica & Molly, I really love what you both said regarding the pervasiveness of prospective thinking, and how our own education is an example of that! But it makes me wonder, if prospective thinking is actually already so fundamental in our psychology and many of our behaviors, why hasn't that *already* stopped us from recklessly destroying the environment? It seems hard to simultaneously make the argument that "humans are already very much prospective thinkers" along with the argument that "we need to emphasize more prospective thinking in order to save the environment." And there are also the problems that Molly already mentioned, regarding prospective approaches that actually haven't worked because they make the effects of environmental destruction feel less personally relevant.
ReplyDeleteSo...what's the difference between prospective-thinking-driven-behaviors when it comes to environmental, issues and prospective-thinking-driven-behaviors when it comes to things like education? Why is there such a strong norm for the latter, but not the former? (I actually don't have an answer to offer...I don't know of any research that has directly compared these two domains of prospective thinking, but now that I think about it, that would be fascinating research to do!)
One possibility I can think of is that it does have to do with personal relevance. Investing in your own education will be directly beneficial to you, whereas the long timespans we talk about regarding environmental issues mean that the benefits of your behaviors aren't necessarily realized within your own lifetime. But then, at the same time, many of us save money for our children's education (which will not necessarily benefit us directly), and yet fail to take strong steps to protect the environment for our children...
Maybe it's because environmental issues are on such a large scale and it's harder for people to grasp the actual impact of their actions, whereas with saving money for their children's education there's a more obvious connection of the impact of each dollar they save? But at the same time, our investment in our own education is pretty nebulous and ill-defined, just like pro-environmental behaviors...we have no way of actually knowing whether getting a graduate degree will actually mean we are more successful in the long term, or how exactly much more money we will actually end up making because of our advanced degree, etc.
I think (at least for me) what these examples and counterexamples are showing is how tricky the problem is! I would love to see a research project that examined WHY prospective thinking has failed to lead to more positive outcomes in the environmental domain. And if other people have any better hypotheses to explain why, I would be very interested to hear those as well!