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ABSTRACT
Until recently, philosophers have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. There is evidence that third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing. The simulation hypothesis proposes that third-person preferences mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. There is also evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past only when we view events as not under our control. When we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis and aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the simulation hypothesis and the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Kristie Miller would like to thank the Australian Research Council (FT170100262 and DP18010010), James Norton would like to thank the Icelandic Centre for Research (195617-051), Andrew J. Latham would like to thank the Ngāi Tai Ki Tāmaki Tribal Trust, and Preston Greene would like to thank the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 RG134/19(NS) for their support.
1. For a more formal characterization of hedonic time-biases see Greene and Sullivan (Citation2015, pp. 948–9).
2. See, inter alia, Prior (Citation1959), Hare (Citation2007, Citation2008), Heathwood (Citation2008), Brink (Citation2011), Greene and Sullivan (Citation2015), Dougherty (Citation2015), Hedden (Citation2015), and Parfit (Citation1984).
3. See Hare (Citation2013), Brink (Citation2011, p. 378), Greene and Sullivan (Citation2015, p. 968), Dougherty (Citation2015, pp. 3, fn. 4), and Parfit (Citation1984, p. 181).
4. Parfit (Citation1984) refuses to label future-bias irrational, but ultimately remains neutral about its rational permissibility.
5. See Brink (Citation2011, pp. 378–9), Greene and Sullivan (Citation2015, p. 968), and Dougherty (Citation2015, pp. 3, fn. 4).
6. For discussion of our capacity to project ourselves in such a way as to take on someone else’s perspective, see Buckner and Carroll (Citation2007) and Goldman (Citation2006). On episodic simulation more generally, and its connection to memory and to imagining potential novel future events, see Szpunar et al. (Citation2016).
7. It seems plausible to hypothesize that people are more likely to be time-neutral when the outcomes are the result of their temporally extended planning, and that people are more likely to be future-biased when the events are random occurrences outside of their control. Greene et al. (Citationforthcoming) support this hypothesis by presenting a variant of ...Parfit’s (Citation1984, p. 165) influential My Past or Future Operations... case in which whether the agent has had a more painful past surgery or will have a less painful future surgery is the result of their own actions. Greene et al. argue that their variant encourages a time-neutral perspective, whereas Parfit’s original version – in which the selected surgery is the result of seemingly random events – encourages a future-biased perspective.
8. An anonymous reviewer suggested that, in a very long journey full of bland meals, the relief from monotony afforded by a different meal – even one’s most disliked meal – might be welcome, and even viewed as a positively valenced event in virtue of its novelty. This is an intriguing suggestion, but there are a couple of reasons to doubt that this is what explains Greene et al.’s (Citationforthcoming) findings. Firstly, Greene et al. (Citation2021) found that most people preferred their least favorite meal to be located in the past when asked using the A/D slider. Secondly, since the meal in question is specified to be the participant’s most disliked meal (which they are stipulated to “really dislike”; it’s not merely their least favorite of the meals they like), we are doubtful that novelty would be sufficient for participants to view this as a positively valenced event.
9. It is notable that the vignettes are contrived in certain ways in order to avoid certain confounds. In particular, Greene et al. (Citation2021) located the relevant party (first- or third-person) on a spacecraft that is out of contact with earth, in order to avoid the possible confound that participants might take themselves to be able to intervene on whether the relevant future event occurs or not. If participants suppose they can prevent the event if it is in the future, then their reported preferences regarding the temporal location of the event might not concern whether the event is past or future, but instead whether the event occurs or does not occur.
10. In all conditions, the orientation of the slider was randomized, so that which end was a preference for the event to occur in the future and which a preference for the event to occur in the past was randomly varied between participants.
11. Participants were quite confident in their judgments regarding their preferences (M = 5.49, SD = 1.18). Results of a one-way ANOVA showed that there was no significant difference in level of confidence between conditions (p = .687).
12. In what follows there were also no significant main effects of age and gender, nor were there any significant interaction effects with age and gender. Further, the inclusion of age and gender as factors has no effect on the results that we report in this paper.
13. We don’t see a shift to a significant majority of participants being past-biased in large part because there is a substantial portion of the population who are time-neutral (and who therefore count as non-past-biased). It is nevertheless the case that the percentage of past-biased, as compared with future-biased, participants, is shifting from future-biased toward past-biased.
14. Indeed, although we do not see a significant majority of past-biased participants in this condition, the matchup between our results and those of Greene et al. (Citation2021) is striking. Whereas they found that 61.5% of participants were future-biased and 38.5% were non-future-biased, we found that 61.5% of participants were past-biased and 38.5% were non-past-biased. The reason that their study found a significant majority to be future-biased, yet we did not find a significant majority to be past-biased, is that they had a larger sample size and thus more power.
15. Such arguments appear in Brink (Citation2011, pp. 378–9), Greene and Sullivan (Citation2015, p. 968), and Dougherty (Citation2015, p. 3).
16. See, for example, Premack and Woodruff (Citation1978), Brüne and Brüne-Cohrs (Citation2006), and De Waal (Citation2008).
17. Greene (Citationforthcoming) suggests that when philosophers debate the rational permissibility of future-bias they should ask “is futureness a rationally permissible ground for a preference” and not “are preferences that are solely grounded in futureness rationally permissible?” Thus, according to Greene, philosophers need not restrict themselves to pure future-biased preferences in debating the rational permissibility of future-bias.
18. See Price (Citation1997).