Looking Forward and Looking Back

Abstract

Past events are perceived to be temporally more distant when they are unlikely rather than likely to reoccur in the future. This can be because (a) future events that are unlikely to occur are perceived to be temporally remote and (b) these feelings of remoteness can generalize and influence subjective distance judgments of the events' occurrences in the past. Six studies confirmed this effect and provided insights into the processes that underlie it. Alternative interpretations and implications of the current findings are discussed.

The Functional Theory of Counterfactual Thinking: New Evidence, New Challenges, New Insights

“…Given a previous failure, individuals may also have quite specific aspects of the event activated from memory. An illustration of this idea comes from a research that examined the impact of opportunity on recollections of the past (Si, Wyer, & Dai, 2016). These researchers manipulated opportunity by having participants focus on a recent factual New Year's Eve experience and then explain why it was either likely or unlikely to recur (Study 2).…”

When Did it Happen? Verbal Information About Causal Relations Affects Time Estimation

“…In addition to the methodological concerns the quasi-experimental design entails (see Andrade, 2021), the results observed by these authors could be asymmetrically affected by some variables. For example, estimating when an event has occurred is affected by several factors such as, for instance, how likely it is to reoccur (Si et al, 2016), how complex it is (Zakay & Block, 1997), or whether it has provided a greater contextual change (Zakay & Block, 2004), among others (see also Kaju & Maglio, 2022;Tu & Soman, 2022;Zauberman et al, 2010). Finally, these experiments did not control for some factors that could affect the participants' temporal judgments, such as, for instance, the previous knowledge that participants have about the historical events used in the task, as well as how and when participants acquired this knowledge.…”