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Two reasons. First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact. For instance, volunteers in one study received a series of twenty electric shocks and were warned three seconds before the onset of each one.[36] Some volunteers (the high-shock group) received twenty high-intensity shocks to their right ankles. Other volunteers (the low-shock group) received three high-intensity shocks and seventeen low-intensity shocks. Although the low-shock group received fewer volts than the high-shock group did, their hearts beat faster, they sweated more profusely and they rated themselves as more afraid. Why? Because volunteers in the low-shock group received shocks of different intensities at different times, which made it impossible for them to anticipate their futures. Apparently, three big jolts that one cannot foresee are more painful than twenty big jolts that one can.[37]
The second reason why we take such pains to imagine unpleasant events is that fear, worry and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives. We motivate employees, children, spouses and pets to do the right thing by dramatizing the unpleasant consequences of their misbehaviours, and so too do we motivate ourselves by imagining the unpleasant tomorrows that await us should we decide to go light on the sunscreen and heavy on the éclairs. Forecasts can be ‘fearcasts.’[38] whose purpose is not to predict the future so much as to preclude it, and studies have shown that this strategy is often an effective way to motivate people to engage in prudent, prophylactic behavior.[39] In short, we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.
Prospection and Control
Prospection can provide pleasure and prevent pain, and this is one of the reasons why our brains stubbornly insist on churning out thoughts of the future. But it is not the most important reason. Americans gladly pay millions–perhaps even billions–of dollars every year to psychics, investment advisors, spiritual leaders, weather forecasters and other assorted hucksters who claim they can predict the future. Those of us who subsidize these fortune-telling industries do not want to know what is likely to happen just for the joy of anticipating it. We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it. If interest rates are going to skyrocket next month, then we want to shift our money out of bonds right now. If it is going to rain this afternoon, then we want to grab an umbrella this morning. Knowledge is power, and the most important reason why our brains insist on simulating the future even when we’d rather be here now, enjoying a goldfish moment, is that our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have.
But why should we want to have control over our future experiences? On the face of it, this seems about as nonsensical as asking why we should want to have control over our television sets and our automobiles. But indulge me. We have a large frontal lobe so that we can look into the future, we look into the future so that we can make predictions about it, we make predictions about it so that we can control it–but why do we want to control it at all? Why not just let the future unfold as it will and experience it as it does? Why not be here now and there then? There are two answers to this question, one of which is surprisingly right and the other of which is surprisingly wrong.
The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control–not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective–changing things, influencing things, making things happen–is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.[40] Before our butts hit the very first nappy, we already have a throbbing desire to suck, sleep, poo and make things happen. It takes us a while to get around to fulfilling the last of these desires only because it takes us a while to figure out that we have fingers, but when we do, look out world. Toddlers squeal with delight when they knock over a stack of blocks, push a ball or squash a cupcake on their foreheads. Why? Because they did it, that’s why. Look, Mum, my hand made that happen. The room is different because I was in it. I thought about falling blocks, and poof, they fell.
The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.[41] And occasionally dead. In one study, researchers gave elderly residents of a local nursing home a house-plant. They told half the residents that they were in control of the plant’s care and feeding (high-control group), and they told the remaining residents that a staff person would take responsibility for the plant’s well-being (low-control group).4[42] Six months later, 30 per cent of the residents in the low-control group had died, compared with only 15 per cent of the residents in the high-control group. A follow-up study confirmed the importance of perceived control for the welfare of nursing-home residents but had an unexpected and unfortunate end.[43] Researchers arranged for student volunteers to pay regular visits to nursing-home residents. Residents in the high-control group were allowed to control the timing and duration of the student’s visit (‘Please come visit me next Thursday for an hour’), and residents in low-control group were not (‘I’ll come visit you next Thursday for an hour’). After two months, residents in the high-control group were happier, healthier, more active and taking fewer medications than those in the low-control group. At this point the researchers concluded their study and discontinued the student visits. Several months later they were chagrined to learn that a disproportionate number of residents who had been in the high-control group had died. Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended.
Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.
Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable. For instance, people bet more money on games of chance when their opponents seem incompetent than competent–as though they believed they could control the random drawing of cards from a deck and thus take advantage of a weak opponent.[44] People feel more certain that they will win a lottery if they can control the number on their tickets,[45] and they feel more confident that they will win a dice toss if they can throw the dice themselves.[46] People will wager more money on dice that have not yet been tossed than on dice that have already been tossed but whose outcome is not yet known,[47] and they will bet more if they, rather than someone else, are allowed to decide which number will count as a win.[48] In each of these instances, people behave in a way that would be utterly absurd if they believed that they had no control over an uncontrollable event. But if somewhere deep down inside they believed that they could exert control–even one smidgen of an iota of control–then their behavior would be perfectly reasonable. And deep down inside, that’s precisely what most of us seem to believe. Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts! Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed,[49] who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations.[50] These and other findings have led some researchers to conclude that the feeling of control–whether real or illusory–is one of the wellsprings of mental health.[51] So if the question is ‘Why should we want to control our futures?’ then the surprisingly right answer is that it feels good to do so–period. Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy. The act of steering one’s boat down the river of time is a source of pleasure, regardless of one’s port of call.
Now, at this point you probably believe two things. First, you probably believe that if you never heard the phrase “the river of time” again, it would be too soon. Amen. Second, you probably believe that even if the act of steering a metaphorical boat down a clichéd river is a source of pleasure and well-being, where the boat goes matters much, much more. Playing captain is a joy all its own, but the real reason why we want to steer our ships is so that we can get them to Hanalei instead of Jersey City. The nature of a place determines how we feel upon arrival, and our uniquely human ability to think about the extended future allows us to choose the best destinations and avoid the worst. We are the apes that learned to look forward because doing so enables us to shop among the many fates that might befall us and select the best one. Other animals must experience an event in order to learn about its pleasures and pains, but our powers of foresight allow us to imagine that which has not yet happened and hence spare ourselves the hard lessons of experience. We needn’t reach out and touch an ember to know that it will hurt to do so, and we needn’t experience abandonment, scorn, eviction, demotion, disease or divorce to know that all of these are undesirable ends that we should do our best to avoid. We want–and we should
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NOTES Foreword
1
The notes in this book contain references to the scientific research that supports the claims I make in the text. Occasionally they contain some extra information that may be of interest but that is not essential to the argument. If you don’t care about sources, aren’t interested in nonessentials and are annoyed by books that make you flip back and forth all the time, then be assured that the only important note in the book is this one.
2
W. A. Roberts, ‘Are Animals Stuck in Time?’, Psychological Bulletin 128: 473-89 (2002).
3
D. Dennett, Kinds of Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
4
M. M. Haith, ‘The Development of Future Thinking as Essential for the Emergence of Skill in Planning’, in The Developmental Psychology of Planning: Why, How, and When Do We Plan?, ed. S. L. Friedman and E. K. Scholnick (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 25-42.
5
E. Bates, J. Elman and P. Li, ‘Language In, On, and About Time’, in The Development of Future Oriented Processes, ed. M. M. Haith et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
6
B. M. Hood et al., ‘Gravity Biases in a Nonhuman Primate?’, Developmental Science 2: 35-41 (1999). See also D. A. Washburn and D. M. Rumbaugh, ‘Comparative Assessment of Psychomotor Performance: Target Prediction by Humans and Macaques (Macaca mulatta)’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121: 305-12 (1992).
7
L. M. Oakes and L. B. Cohen, ‘Infant Perception of a Causal Event’, Cognitive Development 5: 193-207 (1990). See also N. Wentworth and M. M. Haith, ‘Event-Specific Expectations of 2- and 3-Month-Old Infants’, Developmental Psychology 28: 842-50 (1992).
8
C. M. Atance and D. K. O’Neill, ‘Planning in 3-Year-Olds: A Reflection of the Future Self?’, in The Self in Time: Developmental Perspectives, ed. C. Moore and K. Lemmon (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001); and J. B. Benson, ‘The Development of Planning: It’s About Time’, in Friedman and Scholnick, Developmental Psychology of Planning.
9
Although children begin to talk about the future at about two years, they don’t seem to have a full understanding of it until about age four. See D. J. Povinelli and B. B. Simon, ‘Young Children’s Understanding of Briefly Versus Extremely Delayed Images of the Self: Emergence of the Autobiographical Stance’, Developmental Psychology 34: 188-94 (1998); and K. Nelson, ‘Finding One’s Self in Time’, in The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and the Self Concept, ed. J. G. Snodgrass and R. L. Thompson (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1997), 103-16.
10
C. A. Banyas, ‘Evolution and Phylogenetic History of the Frontal Lobes’, in The Human Frontal Lobes, ed. B. L. Miller and J. L. Cummings (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 83-106.
11
Phineas apparently took the rod with him wherever he went for the rest of his life and would probably be pleased that both it and his skull ended up on permanent display at Harvard’s Warren Anthropological Museum.
12
Modern authors cite the Gage case as evidence for the importance of the frontal lobe, but this is not the way people thought about the incident when it happened. See M. B. Macmillan, ‘A Wonderful Journey Through Skull and Brains: The Travels of Mr. Gage’s Tamping Iron’, Brain and Cognition 5: 67-107 (1986).
13
M. B. Macmillan, ‘Phineas Gage’s Contribution to Brain Surgery’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 5: 56-77 (1996).
14
S. M. Weingarten, ‘Psychosurgery’, in Miller and Cummings, Human Frontal Lobes, 446-60.
15
D. R. Weinberger et al., ‘Neural Mechanisms of Future-Oriented Processes’, in Haith et al., Development of Future Oriented Processes, 221-42.
16
J. M. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex: Anatomy, Physiology, and Neuropsychology of the Frontal Lobe (New York: Lippincott-Raven, 1997), 160-61.
17
A. K. MacLeod and M. L. Cropley, ‘Anxiety, Depression, and the Anticipation of Future Positive and Negative Experiences’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105: 286-89 (1996).
18
M. A. Wheeler, D. T. Stuss and E. Tulving, ‘Toward a General Theory of Episodic Memory: The Frontal Lobes and Autonoetic Consciousness’, Psychological Bulletin 121: 331-54 (1997).
19
FT Melges, ‘Identity and Temporal Perspective’, in Cognitive Models of Psychological Time, ed. R. A. Block (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), 255-66.
20
P. Faglioni, ‘The Frontal Lobes’, in The Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, ed. G. Denes and L. Pizzamiglio (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 1999), 525-69.
21
J. M. Fuster, ‘Cognitive Functions of the Frontal Lobes’, in Miller and Cummings, Human Frontal Lobes, 187-95.
22
E. Tulving, ‘Memory and Consciousness’, Canadian Psychology 26: 1-12 (1985). The same case is described extensively under the pseudonym ‘K.C.’ in E. Tulving et al, ‘Priming of Semantic Autobiographical Knowledge: A Case Study of Retrograde Amnesia’, Brain and Cognition 8: 3-20 (1988).
23
Tulving, ‘Memory and Consciousness’.
24
R. Dass, Be Here Now (New York: Crown, 1971).
25
L. A. Jason et al, ‘Time Orientation: Past, Present, and Future Perceptions’, Psychological Reports 64: 1199-1205 (1989).
26
E. Klinger and W. M. Cox, ‘Dimensions of Thought Flow in Everyday Life’, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 72: 105-28 (1987-88); and E. Klinger, ‘On Living Tomorrow Today: The Quality of Inner Life as a Function of Goal Expectations’, in Psychology of Future Orientation, ed. Z. Zaleski (Lublin, Poland: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 1994), 97-106.
27
J. L. Singer, Daydreaming and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); E. Klinger, Daydreaming: Using Waking Fantasy and Imagery for Self-Knowledge and Creativity (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1990); G. Oettingen, Psychologie des Zukunftdenkens [On the Psychology of Future Thought] (Gottingen, Germany: Hogrefe, 1997).
28
G. F. Loewenstein and D. Prelec, ‘Preferences for Sequences of Outcomes’, Psychological Review 100: 91-108 (1993). See also G. Loewenstein, ‘Anticipation and the Valuation of Delayed Consumption’, Economy Journal 97: 666-84 (1987); and J. Elster and G. F. Loewenstein, ‘Utility from Memory and Anticipation’, in Choice Over Time, ed. G. F. Loewenstein and J. Elster (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 213-34.
29
G. Oettingen and D. Mayer, ‘The Motivating Function of Thinking About the Future: Expectations Versus Fantasies’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83: 1198-1212 (2002).
30
A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, ‘Availability: A Heuristic for Judgment Frequency and Probability’, Cognitive Psychology 5: 207-32 (1973).
31
N. Weinstein, ‘Unrealistic Optimism About Future Life Events’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39: 806-20 (1980).
32
P. Brickman, D. Coates and R. J. Janoff-Bulman, ‘Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36: 917-27 (1978).
33
E. C. Chang, K. Asakawa and L. J. Sanna, ‘Cultural Variations in Optimistic and Pessimistic Bias: Do Easterners Really Expect the Worst and Westerners Really Expect the Best When Predicting Future Life Events?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81: 476-91 (2001).
34
J. M. Burger and M. L. Palmer, ‘Changes in and Generalization of Unrealistic Optimism Following Experiences with Stressful Events: Reactions to the 1989 California Earthquake’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18: 39-43 (1992).
35
H. E. Stiegelis et al, ‘Cognitive Adaptation: A Comparison of Cancer Patients and Healthy References’, British Journal of Health Psychology 8: 303-18 (2003).
36
A. Arntz, M. Van Eck and P. J. de Jong, ‘Unpredictable Sudden Increases in Intensity of Pain and Acquired Fear’, Journal of Psychophysiology 6: 54-64 (1992).
37
Speaking of electric shock, this is probably a good time to mention that psychological experiments such as these are always performed according to the strict ethical guidelines of the American Psychological Association and must be approved by university committees before they are implemented. Those who participate do so voluntarily, are always fully informed of any risks the study may pose to their health or happiness and are given the opportunity to withdraw at any time without fear of penalty. If people are given any false information in the course of an experiment, they are told the truth when the experiment is over. In short, we’re really very nice people.
38
M. Miceli and C. Castelfranchi, ‘The Mind and the Future: The (Negative) Power of Expectations’, Theory and Psychology 12: 335-66 (2002).
39
J. N. Norem, ‘Pessimism: Accentuating the Positive Possibilities’, in Virtue, Vice, and Personality: The Complexity of Behavior, ed. E. C. Chang and L. J. Sanna (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003), 91-104; J. K. Norem and N. Cantor, ‘Defensive Pessimism: Harnessing Anxiety as Motivation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51: 1208-17 (1986).
40
A. Bandura, ‘Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change’, Psychological Review 84: 191-215 (1977); and A. Bandura, ‘Self-Efficacy: Mechanism in Human Agency’, American Psychologist 37: 122-47 (1982).
41
M. E. P. Seligman, Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975).
42
E. Langer and J. Rodin, ‘The Effect of Choice and Enhanced Personal Responsibility for the Aged: A Field Experiment in an Institutional Setting’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34: 191-98 (1976); and J. Rodin and E. J. Langer, ‘Long-Term Effects of a Control-Relevant Intervention with the Institutional Aged’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35: 897-902
43
R. Schulz and B. H. Hanusa, ‘Long-Term Effects of Control and Predictability-Enhancing Interventions: Findings and Ethical Issues’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36: 1202-12 (1978).
44
E. J. Langer, ‘The Illusion of Control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32: 311-28 (1975).
45
Ibid.
46
D. S. Dunn and T. D. Wilson, ‘When the Stakes Are High: A Limit to the Illusion of Control Effect’, Social Cognition 8: 305-23 (1991).
47
L. H. Strickland, R. J. Lewicki and A. M. Katz, ‘Temporal Orientation and Perceived Control as Determinants of Risk Taking’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2: 143-51 (1966).
48
Dunn and Wilson, ‘When the Stakes Are High’.
49
S. Gollin et al, ‘The Illusion of Control Among Depressed Patients’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 88: 454-57 (1979).
50
L. B. Alloy and L. Y. Abramson, ‘Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 108: 441-85 (1979). For a contrary view, see D. Dunning and A. L. Story, ‘Depression, Realism and the Overconfidence Effect: Are the Sadder Wiser When Predicting Future Actions and Events?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61: 521-32 (1991); and R. M. Msetfi et al., ‘Depressive Realism and Outcome Density Bias in Contingency Judgments: The Effect of the Context and Intertrial Interval’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134: 10-22 (2005).
51
S. E. Taylor and J. D. Brown, ‘Illusion and Well-Being: A Social-Psychological Perspective on Mental Health’, Psychological Bulletin 103: 193-210 (1988).