Pragmatic prospection is linked with positive life and workplace outcomes

ABSTRACT

Pragmatic prospection is the ability to think deeply about the future in order to identify and to work productively toward goals. It involves imagining desirable future outcomes, setting sensible goals, making plans, and flexibly executing those plans. We conducted an exploratory survey of full-time working U.S. adults (N = 1541), measuring individual differences in pragmatic prospection along with life- and job-related outcomes. All data from the present survey are publicly available. Pragmatic prospection correlated positively with positive outcomes (e.g. life satisfaction, work productivity), correlated negatively with negative outcomes (e.g. anxiety, depression), and tracked with other adaptive personality traits associated with achievement and psychological adjustment (e.g. high conscientiousness, low neuroticism). These results point to pragmatic prospection as an important component of flourishing, both in the workplace and in daily life.

KEYWORDS:

• pragmatic prospection
• job outcomes
• prospection
• planning
• personality
• life satisfaction
• anxiety
• depression

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank BetterUp, Inc.—Alexi Robichaux and Gabriella Kellerman inparticular—for its sponsorship of this research and for BetterUp’s willingness to share the data collected for research among the wider scientific community. The authors also wish to thank Shi Shi Li and Evan Carr for their early contributions to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data do not need to be requested from the author; they are freely avalible via the project Open Science Framework page, https://osf.io/6huqr/

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2230479

Notes

1. One job-related question about perceived probability of success at work was included in the second block.

2. We note that one reviewer suggested re-analyzing with stepwise regression. However, we are swayed by the widespread sense that stepwise regression is a seriously flawed method that should generally be avoided (e.g. Harrell, 2001; Smith, 2018). Moreover, even if it does have some legitimate uses, the present research is not one of those, given that our study was exploratory rather than testing specific hypotheses about which variables are more influential (or ostensibly ‘more important’) than others.

3. For the full raw correlation table of all measures, see online supplementary materials at osf.io/6huqr/.

4. Henceforth, capitalized ‘Pragmatic Prospection’ refers specifically to the total score of the Pragmatic Prospection Scale, while ‘Pragmatic Prospection’ refers to the construct.

5. All partial correlations controlled for anxiety and depression jointly using the PHQ-4 Total measure.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the BetterUp Labs, San Francisco, CA, USA.