Looking Forward: Time, Change, and the Persistently Positive Future.

Abstract

Thinking about past and future experiences is a fundamental component of mental and social life. My goal is to explore asymmetries in how people’s perceptions of the future uniquely differ from perceptions of similar experiences in the past and present. A large literature suggests that people are pervasively optimistic about the future, believing their lives are headed in an increasingly positive direction. I seek to examine how such beliefs come to be maintained and reinforced. Two particular “strategies” are highlighted, the evidence for which is drawn from 11 studies across 2 empirical papers. First, I show that people simply discount cues that forewarn of negative events in their futures, stubbornly believing that those events will not actually occur (“Easy to Retrieve but Hard to Believe: Metacognitive Discounting of the Unpleasantly Possible: O’Brien, 2013). Second, I show that people perceive their future selves as possessing superior mental capacities compared to their past and present selves; hence, even if bad events were to happen, people believe their future selves will be better equipped to handle them (“Emotional Pasts and Rational Futures: The Mind Perception of Self Over Time”: O’Brien, 2014). Taken together, these findings reveal that people are persistently optimistic by reinforcing their perceptions of a positive future across two routes: in how they perceive the likelihood of external events, and in how they perceive changes in their own internal abilities. This observation helps integrate the existing literature on optimism by making predictions about when a positive future should signify an advantageous boon versus a problematic bias. And more broadly, my dissertation seeks to highlight time as a central construct of social psychology study.