Abstract
Philosophers have long noted, and empirical psychology has lately confirmed, that most people are “biased toward the future”: we prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. At least two explanations have been offered for this bias: (1) belief in temporal passage (or related theses in temporal metaphysics) and (2) the practical irrelevance of the past resulting from our inability to influence past events. We set out to test the latter explanation. In a large survey (n = 1462), we find that participants exhibit significantly less future bias when asked to consider scenarios where they can affect their own past experiences. This supports the “practical irrelevance” explanation of future bias. It also suggests that future bias is not an inflexible preference hardwired by evolution, but results from a more general disposition to “accept the things we cannot change”. However, participants still exhibited substantial future bias in scenarios in which they could affect the past, leaving room for complementary explanations. Beyond the main finding, our results also indicate that future bias is stake-sensitive (i.e., that at least some people discount past experience rather than disregarding it entirely) and that participants endorse the normative correctness of their future-biased preferences and choices. In combination, these results shed light on philosophical debates over the rationality of future bias, suggesting that it may be a rational (reasons-responsive) response to empirical realities rather than a brute, arational disposition.
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Notes
We should note that there is a very large literature on other kinds of time biases. For example, psychologists and behavioural economists have had much to say about future near bias (the preference to have positive events in one’s near future rather than one’s far future, and negative events in one’s far future rather than one’s near future). Rather confusingly, in psychology the term ‘future bias’ has sometimes been used to refer to future near bias (see Takeuchi 2011). But this is not what we mean by this term.
The literature on future near bias has focussed on why, and the rate at which, people ‘temporally discount’ (i.e. show future near bias) (Frederick et al. 2002, p. 377; Holcombe, Latham, Miller & Norton, ms). While early experiments suggest what Ainslie and Haslam (1992, p. 59) call a ‘pervasive devaluation of the future’ (see also Thaler 1981, Hausman 1979, and Akerlof 1991), a more recent meta-analysis (Frederick et al. 2002) describes ‘tremendous variability’ in empirical findings of the rate at which people discount the future.
With few exceptions, this literature has ignored past near bias (the preference for positive events in one’s near past rather than one’s far past, and negative events in one’s far past rather than one’s near past). Rare exceptions include Yi et al. (2006), Bickel et al. (2008), Molouki et al. (2019) and Holcombe et al. (ms). Holcombe et al. report the surprising finding that some people are what they call ‘far-biased’: they prefer positive events in the far past over the near past, and negative events in the near past over the far past.
In addition, there are large literatures that attempt to describe various patterns in our inter-temporal preferences that exhibit themselves in, for instance, voting behaviour, saving behaviours, and other ways in which we plan for the future. Notably, however, none of this research speaks directly to the phenomenon of future bias, since it typically focuses exclusively on our preferences regarding future events, and sets aside our preferences regarding past events.
Though we should be careful not to assume the universality of results we report here, given the cross-cultural differences found by Guo et al. (2012).
It is worth emphasising that the temporal metaphysics hypothesis only claims that our (tacit) belief in a dynamical theory of temporal metaphysics explains our future-biased preferences. The success or failure of this hypothesis has no direct implications regarding the true metaphysics of time. Perhaps the world is non-dynamical, but we falsely believe it to be dynamical, and this false belief explains our future bias. Or perhaps the world is dynamical, and we believe it to be dynamical, but this belief is not the source of our future bias.
Recent empirical work by Latham, Miller and Norton (forthcoming) suggests that, surprisingly, non-philosophers only weakly agree that things seem this way.
For instance, Yehezkel writes that ‘the failure to offer any substantial justification for the asymmetry in our attitudes based on the flow of time stems from the inability to offer any non-trivial account of the flow of time. It is difficult to see what difference is made by the claim that ‘future events are moving closer to reality,’ given that all that is meant by this claim is that ‘in the future, future events will be closer to the present.’ This is a mere truism, as evident by the analogous claim, regarding the past, according to which ‘in the past, past events were closer to the present.’ The attempt to justify the asymmetry between past and future based on the flow of time per se thus seems to collapse into triviality.’ (Yehezkel 2014, pp. 74–5). Similar sceptical remarks are made by Parfit (1984, p. 178) and Hare (2013, pp. 510–511), among others.
Though this passage is often quoted to associate Hume with the practical irrelevance explanation for future bias, this is probably a mistake: Hume is here talking specifically about effects on the will, and the next sentence reads: ‘But with respect to the passions, the question [of what explains ‘the superior effects of the same distance in futurity above that in the past’] is yet entire, and well worth the examining’ (Hume 1739/2000, 2.3.7.6; emphasis added). In trying to account for the past-future asymmetry with respect to the passions, Hume entertains a number of hypotheses, including a version of the temporal metaphysics hypothesis (2.3.7.9), but does not seem to take the practical irrelevance of the past as an explanation for its weaker effect on the passions.
Kauppinen does not claim that our past-directed preferences are always practically inert in the relevant sense. But he holds that when a future-biased preference would influence the agent’s choices, or would contradict an earlier preference on which she has already based a choice, future bias is rationally impermissible, and moreover is no longer psychologically typical.
There is a great deal of controversy regarding whether there is a useful or interesting concept of being hard-wired or innate (see Grossi (2017) for an overview), given that with the exception of inborn reflexes, very few psychological capacities are entirely inflexible (see Lilienfeld et al. 2015). For our purposes, all that matters is that there is a category of adaptations that are relatively more inflexible and specific than others, which are significantly more flexible.
We will talk of both affective and evaluative discounting in what follows. We suppose that both our affective states and evaluative judgments exhibit a bias toward the future and that our affective future bias plays some role in explaining our evaluative future bias. Which of these we focus on in the context of a hypothesis depends on which role we take our affective states to be playing. For instance, if the narrow adaptation hypothesis is true, then the hard-wired mechanism responsible for future bias probably works via our affective states, so we focus on these. On the other hand, if we’re asking about the rationality of future bias, our evaluative judgments are more obviously subject to rational appraisal, and so we focus on these.
Of course, there are A-theoretic properties that do come in degrees, like distance from the present. But most philosophers do not think that these gradable properties have normative significance (as evidenced by the fact that few philosophers endorse any form of pure time preference among future events).
As on the question of cognitive mediation, the philosophical literature seems to be divided on whether we merely discount past pleasures or pains, or are entirely indifferent to them. Hume (1739/2000) treats the past-future asymmetry as a matter of degree (our representations of future events are more vivid than our representations of past events), and so pretty clearly thinks that the past is merely affectively discounted. This ‘discounting’ view is also suggested by Suhler and Callender (2012, p. 5) and endorsed by Yehezkel (2014, p. 78). On the other hand, Parfit (1984) writes that: ‘I do in fact regard my past suffering with complete indifference. I believe that, in this respect, most other people are like me’ (Parfit 1984, p. 173) (Parfit notes, however, that he knows some people who ‘find knowledge of their past pains mildly distressing.’) Dorsey (2018) takes a similar line, suggesting that the level of past pain that could outweigh a given unit of future pain is ‘indeterminately high’ and that it is appropriate to prefer the past pain ‘for virtually any imaginable level of painfulness’ (Dorsey 2018, p. 1915). And Sullivan (2018, p. 58) claims that ‘we assign no value to a merely past painful experience or pleasurable experience.’
Among proponents of the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, Schlesinger (1976) seems to endorse complete indifference to past hedonic experience, arguing that we regard past experiences with an ‘equanimity’ which, if we accept the B-theory of time, should extend to future events as well. Other proponents of the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, like Prior (1959), Craig (1999), and Pearson (2018), do not address the question directly. To our knowledge, no one in the literature has endorsed both the temporal metaphysics hypothesis and the view that we merely discount past hedonic experience.
There is a range of cases that illustrate this idea. For instance, we know that evolutionary pressures in our past, when food was much more scarce, have given us all relatively inflexible preferences for food that is high in fat and carbohydrates. Of course, this is not entirely inflexible, but it is relatively inflexible. Clearly, however, we don’t assume that these preferences are normatively the right ones: in our current environment, they often lead to obesity and early death (e.g., Breslin 2013; Krebs 2009). Likewise, we know that we have a relatively inflexible disposition to see agency in the world. Since detecting agency was very important in our evolutionary history, we evolved mechanisms that are very sensitive to cues that there is an agent present. Those mechanisms are in fact over-sensitive, and so signal the presence of agents where there are none, including signalling the presence of agents in natural phenomena such as volcanoes, crop variation, and so on. But we can have this disposition to see agency in natural phenomena without endorsing it as normatively correct (e.g., Barrett 2000; Norenzayan et al. 2008).
See Ahler, Roush & Soud (2020) for a discussion of some of the problems associated with collecting data using MTurk and the prevalence thereof.
These vignettes are based on a thought experiment described in Tarsney (2017).
The implications of the temporal metaphysics hypothesis are somewhat complicated by the possibility of backward time travel. When an agent supposes that she herself will travel into the past, she may well believe that some experiences in the ‘physical past’ are in her ‘experiential future’, and therefore take the same attitudes toward them that she would toward future experiences. But, although our vignettes involve backward time travel, they don’t involve the agent (the character whose perspective subjects are asked to adopt) traveling into the past, and so we should still expect the temporal metaphysics hypothesis to straightforwardly predict indifference to all past experiences.
It also contradicts Dorsey’s claim that causal access to the past ‘makes little difference’ to our time-asymmetric attitudes (Dorsey 2018, p. 1910). On the other hand, the finding of residual future bias in choice conditions contradicts Kauppinen’s overly bold claim that ‘our intuitions are temporally neutral when it comes to active choices regarding pleasure and pain’ (Kauppinen 2018, p. 243).
It is important to be clear that these results speak only to the role that (implicit or explicit) beliefs about temporal metaphysics play in our asymmetric attitudes toward past and future, and do not tell us anything about the true metaphysics of time. In particular, even if we were to fully reject the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, this would not justify the conclusion that dynamical theories of time are false. There are many reasons to be drawn to dynamical theories of time, beyond thinking that they might explain or justify our future-biased preferences. (Indeed, one could still hold that facts about the metaphysics of time justify future bias, without claiming that those facts, or our beliefs about them, play a predominant role in explaining that bias.) So, unsurprisingly, these results give us little reason to have one, rather than another, view about temporal metaphysics itself.
Exegesis is challenging here, since most discussions of potential evolutionary explanations for future bias in the extant literature do not distinguish between a narrow adaptation for indifference to past experience and a more general adaptation that has the cognitively mediated downstream effect of indifference to past experience. The remarks on future bias in Horwich (1987) and Maclaurin and Dyke (2002), for instance, are most naturally read as positing a narrow adaptation only insofar as their explanations do not mention any more general mechanism or broader adaptation. Suhler and Callender (2012) offer a very intricate evolutionary explanation of future bias, but their story remains open to multiple interpretations at key points. On the one hand, they emphasise that ‘our explanation does not make the implausible claim that there evolved some wholly new, dedicated mechanism for valuing past and future’ (p. 13). But in context, they seem to be simply pointing out that the selective forces that favoured concern for the future and indifference to the past operated on organisms with already-developed, general-purpose capacities for representation (of past and future events) and affective response. The core of their explanation for future bias (p. 12) seems to be simply that, with these cognitive capacities in place, evolution preferred organisms who had strong affective responses to representations of future pleasures and pains, but not to representations of past pleasures and pains.
Philosophers who see our future-biased attitudes as rational (at least when they concern the agent’s own pleasant and unpleasant experiences) include Prior (1959), Kauppinen (2018), Dorsey (2018), and Pearson (2018). Those who regard future bias as irrational include Dougherty (2011), Brink (2011), Greene and Sullivan (2015), Sullivan (2018), and Garrett (2018).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this excellent suggestion.
James Norton would like to thank the Icelandic Centre for Research (Grant 195617-051). Andrew J. Latham would like to thank the Ngāi Tai Ki Tāmaki Tribal Trust for their support.
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Latham, A.J., Miller, K., Norton, J. et al. Future bias in action: does the past matter more when you can affect it?. Synthese 198, 11327–11349 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02791-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02791-0