Time Warped (27 page)

Curiously these studies have occasionally forecast real events. In the year 2000 people were asked to imagine their emotions on hearing the news that the Space Shuttle Columbia had been destroyed, killing a dozen astronauts.
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In their version it crashed into the Mir space station, but it was another three years until the space shuttle really did explode, killing all seven crew members. The same study asked them to envisage the USA toppling Saddam Hussein in a second Gulf War. Again they were three years ahead of the real event.

To sum up so far, future thinking is crucial and might even be the brain’s default position, but our judgements are skewed by a tendency to concentrate on the initial and
chief features of an event and to base our predictions on our most extreme past experiences, rather than the more typical. And just like the children with the pretzels, who found it hard to imagine that they could possibly feel anything but thirsty the following day, even as adults we find it hard to discount the way we feel in the present. When people are not hungry they say they’re not keen on the idea of spaghetti Bolognese for breakfast, but pose the same question when they do feel hungry and suddenly the idea of an evening meal for breakfast becomes more appealing. The mind can generate very convincing simulations of the future, but they are not perfect, especially when it comes to their emotional content. We are simply not very good at predicting how we’ll feel in the future, which can lead to some unfortunate decisions.

BAD CHOICES

The way we hold the future in mind has important consequences for decision-making. The Impact Bias affects the choices we make, as can errors in our predictions about what makes us happy. If we decide to move house we become convinced that our future happiness depends on finding the right home, in the right location. In fact our happiness in that house will be far more dependent on the relationship we have with our partner or housemates.
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Likewise if someone announces they are leaving their current job for another that pays a bit better, most of their friends will consider it to be a logical move, despite the fact that our well-being is influenced more by our colleagues
and the atmosphere at work, than by a small pay rise.

You have two projects to complete – one is easy because it’s in English, but the topic is the history of social psychology, something which doesn’t especially appeal to you (although I can’t think why not – it’s interesting, genuinely). The second project is harder because it is written in French, but it concerns romantic love, so you might even learn something useful. One project is due in next week, the other in two months’ time. You can choose which project to do first, but whichever you select you will only receive the instructions one week before the deadline. Which would you do first?

When this study was conducted with students in Israel, with the projects either in Hebrew (the easy option) or in English (the difficult option), the overwhelming preference was to do the easy but dull project first and to save the interesting but trickier option for later.
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When they contemplated the future, people didn’t seem to worry about how long the project might take. They were convinced that in the future they would have more time, so it wouldn’t matter. I’ve already discussed how our optimism increases the further into the future we transport ourselves and nowhere is this more evident than with time itself. Despite all the evidence from past experience, we are always certain that in the future we will have more spare time.
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Students were given two lecture options for the following year. They could attend an interesting lecture on the other side of town or a boring lecture in the hall next door. Most opted for the interesting lecture. No surprise there perhaps.
But if they were told the lecture was tomorrow instead of next year they reversed their decision. Once they took the practicalities into account they realised they had too much to do to travel across town and so they chose the dull, but convenient, lecture instead.
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Although we know intellectually that every activity we choose comes at the expense of other ways we might use those hours, this only seems to matter to us in the near future; in the distant future we simplify the situation and omit crucial elements, forgetting that in a year’s time we will be just as busy.

This optimism that we have more time in the future is fascinating, because we never seem to learn that it’s not true. So we postpone going to the gym today because we’re too busy, but sincerely intend to go tomorrow. We retain a constant optimism about our future selves. We’ll be better. We’ll be more organised. And therefore we’ll have more time. A year from now we picture ourselves as consistent, methodical people who could easily fit in some extra activities. But when we consider ourselves next week, we know we couldn’t possibly take anything else on. In the near future we take into account the circumstances that might thwart us – but the person we see in the distant future appears unaffected by anything as ordinary as a broken-down train. We even use simpler adjectives to describe ourselves in the future.
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This rosy view of the future causes us to try repeatedly to cram more into a week than is possible. If someone asks me to give a talk in Wales some time next year, I might say yes, thinking that I’ll arrange my work so that I have a free day to take the three-hour train journey to Wales. It seems like a good idea until the date approaches and my
diary is so full that I wish I’d never agreed to it. Yet if someone asked me if I could go to Wales to give a talk next week I know immediately that I must decline. This optimism about free time in the future can lead to procrastination.

It is often assumed that procrastination is simply caused by laziness and a lack of focus. In fact we sincerely believe that in the future, even next week, we will have fewer demands on our time. Tasks need not be tedious for us to procrastinate. Companies are pleased to offer hugely discounted online vouchers to use in the future because they know that even when the voucher is for something as pleasurable as a good meal, the chances are that many of us will never get round to spending it. Suzanne Shu demonstrated this in a study where people claimed to prefer vouchers with distant deadlines, but were in reality much less likely to spend them than vouchers that expired in two weeks.
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She also found that visitors to cities do more sightseeing in three weeks than those living there do in three years – because they have a deadline. When there’s no deadline people don’t see the sights because they continue to believe that they’ll have more free time to do so at a later date. We’ve all done it. For nearly a decade I had the chance, as a result of my partner’s job, to go and see Prime Minister’s Questions from the press gallery at the House of Commons, but somehow I was always busy on a Wednesday. It wasn’t until the very last Wednesday that a pass was available to me that I finally went, even though it was something I very much wanted to do. In a study in Chicago, Shu even discovered that long-term residents who were moving away for good were trying to
intersperse their packing with hurried sightseeing because they had never seen their own city.

FIVE YEARS TO REACH THE WORD
‘
ANT
’

In 1857 the Philological Society of London made an announcement – the formation of the Unregistered Words Committee, which would collect all the English words currently absent from the available dictionaries. Five months later the Dean of Westminster Richard Chenevix Trench went a step further when he delivered a two-part paper calling for a complete re-examination of the history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. This would be the finest dictionary every created. By 1860 the plans were in place and it was announced that the dictionary would be ready within two years. It’s fair to say that there were some unavoidable delays. A young man named Herbert Coleridge had begun work on the dictionary, starting with words beginning with A–D, but was taken ill with tuberculosis, reputedly exacerbated by sitting in damp clothes at a meeting of the Philological Society itself.
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Just two weeks after presenting the society with the first set of words, he died. After that things moved slowly. In 1879 a deal was struck to publish the dictionary with the Oxford University Press, with a new completion date set for 10 years later. But after five years they had only got as far as the word ‘ant’. Nobody had anticipated the work involved in tracing the history of words across seven centuries while keeping up to date with a language that was constantly evolving. Decades of research followed until
finally in 1928 the complete
Oxford English Dictionary
was finished. Immediately considered out of date, revisions began at once.

Even compared with the over-runs which blight government procurement of new computer systems or public buildings, a prediction of two years for a project that took 71 is some underestimate. Yet looking from the outside it seems obvious that the task was so substantial that even the longer 10-year deadline was over-optimistic. We have the advantage of hindsight of course, but our position as outsiders brings us a second advantage – an unexpected degree of skill at predicting how long someone else’s project will take to complete. When a friend tells us of their disappointment that their kitchen is still not ready despite the builders’ promises at the start, we are not at all surprised. Yet this skill deserts us when it comes to our own projects. This tendency to underestimate how long a task will take is called the ‘Planning Fallacy’. The cause rests once again in the key feature of future thinking that I’ve already discussed – the lack of detail. The further into the future we look, the more we ignore the details, but, and this is where it becomes more curious,
we
do consider the details when contemplating someone else’s future. When reflecting on another person’s project we consider both the length of time similar tasks have taken them and the factors that might disrupt them – illness, unexpected visits from friends, tiredness, etc. When estimating how long our own project will take us we ignore all this information and focus only on the features of this singular task.
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The beauty of the study which best demonstrated this was that for once it
didn’t use hypothetical situations, where you can never be certain that this is how people would behave in real life. Instead they tested students who were trying to finish their theses. They found that they were much better at predicting how long
other
students’ theses would take. When it came to their own they did on occasion refer to past projects, but not to enable them to make a more accurate prediction, rather to justify their optimism. They seemed to forget all the occasions in the past where their good intentions had been disrupted by unexpected events.

There are many methods of avoiding the Planning Fallacy and making more accurate predictions about the demands of a task. I’ll discuss this some more in the next chapter, but here are two simple techniques to be getting on with. Either ask someone else to assess how long your project will take or, if you want to decide for yourself, then adopt the strategies that they would use and apply them to your own situation. Deliberately think back to all similar past occasions, but compare them with the present circumstances before you make your estimate. Research has shown that just as our idealised future tells us nothing, neither does considering the past alone. If you really want to know how long a job will take, you need to think about past occasions and then look at the details of the new task to see how it matches up. Then add on some time for the types of disruptions you have encountered in the past and a little more for the fact that unfortunately you are not suddenly going to be transformed into a super-organised person who doesn’t need to sleep.

I’ve discussed some of the errors we make in future
thinking, but there are two final aspects to the way we consider time in the future that I want to think about. First, some people spend more time considering the future than others, which brings us to the topic of time orientation.

ONE MARSHMALLOW OR TWO
?

If I offered you the choice between eating one marshmallow now or two if you are prepared to sit and wait with the marshmallows for 10 minutes before you eat them, which would you choose? It will of course depend on your liking for marshmallows and whether you have better things to do with the next 10 minutes. You might decide that it would be easier to take one marshmallow now, knowing you can buy yourself a whole bagful on the way home if it gives you a taste for them. But four-year-olds don’t have this option, and so the marshmallow question is one they take very seriously. Not only that, but the decision they make can predict how well they will do at college or the likelihood that in 20 years’ time they will take drugs.

The marshmallow studies are some of the most famous experiments to have been conducted at the Bing Nursery, found at a crossroad on one side of the Stanford University campus. When university staff send their children to this nursery, part of the deal is that they give permission for them to take part in psychological research. It’s easy to see why they say yes. The nursery is packed with toys, games, craft materials and happy staff. The sunny California weather means the children are free to wander out into the large landscaped play area whenever they feel like it. But
despite all these facilities, there is one part of the day that many of the children like better than any other – the moment when a researcher invites them into one of the special rooms surrounding the central courtyard. These rooms are small and contain nothing but a table, some child-sized chairs and a video camera. At first sight, playing outside on the climbing frames would seem like a much better prospect. The children don’t know they are taking part in research which could transform our views on child development and influence policy on childcare. They don’t know that these studies could have a lifetime of implications. What they do know is that for a short while in that room they and they alone will have the focused attention of an adult who will give them a new game to play. When I visited it was clear that this was a rather special nursery, one that has been home to more discoveries in developmental psychology than any other in the world.