Does episodic future thinking differ when considering the future of the natural environment? An experimental test

Abstract

The cognitive ability to mental time travel allows people to project themselves backward and forward in time. Research has shown that anticipating and envisioning possible future events, and imagining ourselves experiencing those events, has many implications for health, finance, and environmental protection. While many public policies in these domains consider events that may occur decades ahead in the future, current evidence suggests we typically consider a much shorter temporal distance when spontaneously thinking about the future. Here we examined whether this typical short temporal distance would vary if individuals were primed to think about the future of the natural environment in a between-subjects experiment with online respondents (212 MTurkers). We compared responses from individuals randomly asked to think about the future in general (control condition) to those asked to think about the future of the natural environment (main experimental condition) or the future of the work environment (contrasting experimental condition). Results confirmed that individuals typically think in very short term into the future, with temporal distance between 1 and 5 years. Supporting our intuition, results showed that individuals asked to think about the future of the natural environment were statistically more likely to think longer term (10 years or more) compared to those in the other conditions. We discuss the implications of our findings to time‐scale mismatches in policy making.