Future Self-Continuity Increases Responsibility during Covid-19 Restrictions

Abstract

The failure to engage in responsible behaviour is related to the inability to consider future consequences of actions. An experiment was conducted to examine whetherincreasing the vividness of the future self affects adherence and endorsement of COVID-19 safety measures. A total of 184 participants were randomly assigned to 3 groups. Depending on the experimental condition, they were tasked with writing a letter to other people (their friend), a proximal future self, and a distant future self. Participants in the distant future self and the other people conditions showed greater adherence intentions than proximal future self participants. No differences were found between the distant future self and the other people group. Further group differences were found in the endorsement of safety measures, with the distant-future self-group showing more condemnation than the other two groups. Commitment to the COVID-19 safety measures mediated the group differences on both dependent variables. The results are discussed within the framework of the Construal Level Theory and the Future Self-continuity model.

Future Self to Current Action: Integrated Review and Identity-Based Motivation Synthesis

“…Four-to-five-year-olds were more likely to remember to ask for a promised gift after a time delay (but no more likely to delay gratification) if read a story about their future self rather than their present selves or other children's present or future selves (Leech et al, 2019) Simi c et al, 2021). In this study, students either wrote a letter to a friend, themselves in 3 months or themselves in 10 years.…”

Future Self-Continuity Promotes Meaning in Life Through Authenticity

“…Hong et al, , 2022. Further, the construct is often manipulated by representing one's future self vividly in their imagination (Hershfield, 2011), interacting virtually with an aged version of themselves (Hershfield, 2011;Shen et al, 2022), visualizing the future as a journey (Landau et al, 2014), writing a letter to one's future self (Simić et al, 2021) and-pretending to be that future self-writing back (Chishima & Wilson, 2021), chronicling an imagined day in one's life when they are 70 years old (Gasiorek, 2022), or varying the strength of association with one's future self (Sedikides et al, 2023;cf. Sedikides et al, 2015).…”