Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Temporally Extended Self: The Relation of Past and Future Selves to Current Identity, Motivation, and Goal Pursuit

Abstract

Author's IntroductionPeople have long been fascinated by the notion of time travel. Physicists, philosophers, and fortune tellers have all grappled with whether and how we might grasp the past and the future. From H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the cartoon Futurama, the implications, paradoxes, and promises of time travel frequently appear in fiction, film, and popular culture. In 2005, a student from MIT even hosted a time travelers’ convention in the hope that representatives from the future would come upon the invitation and pop back for a visit. Not to be outdone, psychologists have focused their energies on mental time travel, developing methods allowing us to understand how people take trips down memory lane, and how they sneak preview their own anticipated future. Some theorists have argued that humans’ capacity for mental time travel forms the basis for many aspects of human culture. Psychologists have approached these questions from many angles, from studying personal narratives to examining patterns of brain activation. Converging results from a range of methods have suggested notable parallels between the past and the future from how they are constructed and reconstructed. Just as a palaeontologist reconstructs a dinosaur out of fragments of recovered bone (and a good theory of how they might all fit together), we use fragments of the past, along with our beliefs and theories about the self through time, to reconstruct autobiographical episodes. We often draw on these past experiences to allow us to project ‘what ifs’ into the future and to construct elaborate, if hypothetical, plans for what is to come. Our personal memories and corresponding future predictions are even represented in similar areas of the brain, and amnesic patients who lose their personal history often also lose their grasp on a personal future and even their sense of self. In our research lab, we have been interested in how current identity guides people's memories of their past and their expectations and plans for future selves, and how, in turn, personal memories and self‐predictions help to determine current self and identity. Past and future selves may be ephemeral, but they are not inconsequential. Not only do they affect present self‐views, but they also serve to motivate goal‐pursuit and influence decisions. In our lab (and many others), we examine some of the interconnections between past, present, and future selves, identity, motivation, and behavior.Author Recommends: