Time Warped

by Claudia Hammond

  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.

  The psychologist Walter Mischel began his marshmallow studies here in 1968. Like many classic psychology experiments it wouldn’t be allowed today, not because of the tightening up of the ethics of experimentation, but because – the staff told me – today’s parents would find it unacceptable that their children were given sweets at nursery, even if it were just one marshmallow or two.

  The study works like this. A child sits at a table on which there are two white plates and a small hand bell. On the centre of one plate sits a single, pink marshmallow. On the other plate there are two. The experimenter says she is leaving the room and that the child has a choice. If she wants two marshmallows she needs to wait a while until the experimenter returns. Alternatively the child can choose to ring the bell and will then be allowed to eat the marshmallow immediately, but she will only get the one. It is a straightforward choice – one sweet now versus two in 10 minutes’ time.

  Between 1968 and 1974 more than 500 children took the marshmallow test. While they waited there was nothing to play with and nothing else to do apart from gaze longingly at those plump, pink marshmallows. This test measures a child’s ability to resist temptation, to delay gratification. The early studies weren’t filmed, but watching later films of replications you can see the tactics employed by some children to distract themselves from the marshmallows. A few cover their eyes. Others sit on their hands. Some stare determinedly at the ceiling. They do anything they can to stop themselves from focusing on those sweet, chewy marshmallows. Not a single child asks why they should have to wait in order to get two sweets; they seem to take the rules at face value. As Walter Mischel told me, ‘To them this is real life.’

  It would appear to be a simple test of patience and self-control, but when Mischel followed the children up many years later he discovered his test was far more powerful than he would ever have guessed. The children who had waited patiently for the reward of two marshmallows were more likely to have succeeded at school, at college and at work. Those who had gone straight for the single marshmallow were more likely to have taken drugs, to have lower incomes or to be in prison.117 I spoke to Carolyn Weisz, who was one of the children who took part in Mischel’s marshmallow test 40 years ago. She remembers the nursery but doesn’t know whether she took the marshmallow or not, and because the study still continues all these decades later, the researchers are careful never to reveal an individual’s results. Today they are sending laptops out across the country for these now middle-aged participants to complete batteries of tests. Coincidentally Weisz is now a professor of psychology herself and remembers her time at the Bing Nursery fondly.

  The purpose of this study was never to label children, and of course the results are averaged over large numbers so if you were to try the test on your own child and found them to be impulsive, they are not doomed to a life of crime. Experiments are now taking place to see how you can teach the most impulsive children to employ those same distraction strategies used by the children with the best self-control.

  So where does time come into all this? The marshmallow studies tend to be characterised as tests of impulsivity, but they could also be useful in measuring the extent to which the children consider the future – their future orientation. When Mischel studied teenagers, he found that those who were good at delaying gratification were also judged by their parents to be better at planning than the adolescents who had opted for the single marshmallow a decade earlier. In a more recent study where teenagers were asked to choose between a small amount of money immediately versus a larger amount later, personality tests showed it wasn’t their impulsivity that best predicted their answers, but the degree to which their thinking was orientated towards the future. They found that 10- to 13-year-olds were prepared to accept less money if they could have it sooner, while over-sixteens chose to wait for a larger sum.118 This suggests that a quantifiable change in thinking about the future occurs during the middle-to-late teens.

  Adolescence is known to be a stage of life where people take risks without considering the consequences for the future. The response from those designing health promotion campaigns has been to focus on the short-term – anti-smoking campaigns featuring jars of make-up turned into ash trays to emphasise the effect smoking can have on your skin today, instead of concentrating on the impact on your lungs in half a century’s time. Various physiological explanations have been sought for this teenage tendency to take risks, including the slow development of the frontal cortex, the influence of hormones on the immune system and the continuing development of working memory. The cognitive networks that bring control take longer to mature, so in the meantime emotional network
s and reward-seeking mechanisms take over in the brain and the result is that the teenager takes risks. But future orientation seems to be crucial too. Many studies have found that the older adolescents are, the more likely they are to plan and to take future considerations into account when making decisions.

  FUTURE-ORIENTATED THINKING

  The charismatic psychologist Philip Zimbardo (who thought nothing of giving an undergraduate lecture wearing a glittery top hat) is famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment, in which he transformed the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University in California into a make-shift jail, divided volunteers into guards and prisoners and then sat back to see what happened. It didn’t go well. Or rather it didn’t go well for the prisoners, who soon found themselves shockingly mistreated by the guards. It went better for Zimbardo, securing a place for his study as a classic in social psychology. In the end his research assistant – who later became his wife – convinced him that the violence was getting too serious and he must call a halt to the study. Compared with that experiment, his more recent research on time orientation seems quite tame, but is significant nonetheless.

  Individuals vary in the degree to which their thinking is orientated towards the future. Inevitably circumstances can sometimes prevent us from planning ahead; if you don’t have anywhere to sleep next week, you are unlikely to focus on your career prospects five years hence. But while future thinking could be the default when the mind is unoccupied, some people actively choose to reflect on the future far more than others. Charles Darwin revealed himself to have an extreme future-orientation in his thinking (perhaps because he was concerned with looking so far into the distant past) when he wrote a list of the pros and cons of getting married. A con of not marrying was the lack of anyone to care for him in his old age. Another was the lack of children, after which he put in brackets ‘no second life’. I think it’s safe to say that Darwin was looking well into the future.

  The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory assesses these temporal biases and divides them into six time perspectives: past-negative, past-positive, present-fatalistic, present-hedonistic, future and transcendental future. Using his questionnaire you can measure the extent to which your outlook falls into these categories. Naturally none of us spends our mental lives in one time frame alone, but for most people, two or three of these six time-frames predominate. Not surprisingly those with a present-hedonistic orientation live in the moment and are more likely to gamble, drink a lot and take risks on the roads, while those with a future orientation (those same teenagers prepared to wait longer in exchange for a greater sum of money) do better in exams and are more likely to floss their teeth.

  So which time orientation brings maximum happiness? The past-negative doesn’t sound like a good place to be, but adopting the modern view of nostalgia Zimbardo views the past-positive orientation as a good thing, provided you’re not mourning the loss of your past. Many researchers have found people with a future orientation to be generally happier, but Zimbardo disagrees, warning that an excessive future orientation can lead to workaholism, a lack of social contact and a poor sense of community. His research shows that we should aim not for one particular orientation to dominate, but for a balance between them. This seems to be easier said than done. His colleague’s study found that only 8 per cent of participants had a fully balanced time perspective. Curious considering he believes this balance is required for happiness and yet in well-being surveys a far higher percentage of people than this describe themselves as being satisfied or very satisfied with life.

  Zimbardo does suggest that when you’ve worked out which time orientation might predominate in your life by completing his online questionnaire, then making a few very small changes to your life could make a difference. If you are low on past-positive, you could choose to phone an old friend to reconnect, you with the past. If you’re low on present orientation, then set aside an hour to do something utterly absorbing. To increase your future-orientation, plan a future event in detail. The greatest chance of happiness, he says, comes from a combination of a past-positive and future perspectives, with just the right amount of present-hedonistic, living-in-the-moment thrown in. Examining your time perspective through surveys like Zimbardo’s can be an illuminating exercise, but making lasting changes could be difficult.

  LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

  There is one other element of our perception of the future that varies among individuals and societies. This is not about whether you focus on the past or the future, but how far you look ahead or behind you. The first time capsule from the long-running British children’s TV programme Blue Peter was buried in 1971 before being moved to a new underground site where it was joined by a second capsule in 1984. The capsules remained under the Blue Peter garden and, despite the rumour that the BBC had lost the map with their location, were unearthed during a special programme in the year 2000. The capsule had only been under the ground for 29 years, which in the scheme of things doesn’t seem that long. Even the ex-presenter Peter Purves, who returned for the opening of the box, admitted he was surprised so many people were interested. But they were. The presenters waved sheaves of letters from the people who had, as requested back in 1971, written in to remind them to dig up the capsule. Sadly when the current and ex-presenters gathered for the solemn opening of the box, they had to obscure their disappointment. The film of the box’s burial 29 years earlier had talked of the lead lining and the bolts sealing the box ‘absolutely tight’. Sadly not tight enough. Water had seeped in and removal of the lid revealed something of a muddy, sodden mess, although the first set of decimal coins survived, as did the Blue Peter badges. Other capsules won’t be opened until 2029 and 2050. This time-frame seems reasonable for a TV programme hoping to evoke a little nostalgia and create moments in its own history, but it is dwarfed by the many time capsules buried in Japan with instructions to keep them sealed for 5,000 years. Now that is what I call temporal depth!

  So what is it that dictates our temporal depth? Winston Churchill once said, ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.’ Recent experiments have proved him right. Here’s a test:

  Think of an event that happened to you a short time ago and write down the date, then write down an event and date that happened a middling time ago and finally an event which happened a long time ago and its date. Now write down three more events and their corresponding dates, but for occasions that you think you might experience in the near future, the middling future and the distant future. Compare the dates. Which are more distant, the dates of events in the past or events in the future?

  As usual there are no right or wrong answers, but most people choose dates in the future which are farther away from the present than the dates they select for the past. The organisational psychologist Allen Bluedorn found that most people see the short-term future as being five times longer than the short-term or recent past. Nearly everyone defines the short-term past as falling within the last six months and two-thirds say it means an event happened as recently as a fortnight ago or less. This suggests we look slightly further into the future than into the past. And this next finding is where Churchill was onto something: the more distant the dates people selected for the past events, the further ahead they looked for the future events. So it is true that the further you look back, the further you look forward (reminiscent of Darwin and his marriage list).

  Even the order in which you contemplate the past and the future can make a subtle difference to your thinking, and one you can utilise too. A group of CEOs at Silicon Valley companies were asked to name 10 future events followed by 10 events from the past. A second group did the same except they were told to list the past events first and then the future events. Whether the future was considered first or second made no difference to people’s temporal depth, but if they considered the past first, they chose future events an average of five years further away.119 This difference is striking. It provides a practical lesson for
those in business: the older an organisation, the further its members tend to look into the future. There is a management exercise that attempts to harness this idea by instructing managers to say what their hopes are for their company in the future-perfect tense rather than the simple future. So instead of saying, ‘We will sort out the problems on the production line,’ they say, ‘We will have sorted out the problems on the production line.’120 The idea, paradoxically, is that this tense feels closer to the past tense and so it makes it easier to imagine future possibilities. Using the past to imagine the future can even make a difference to the quality of imagination. If people are asked to describe an imaginary car accident which happened in the past tense, they do so in far more detail than if they’re asked to describe an equally imaginary accident in the future tense. Both events are fictional. Both require imagination. And yet one is easier.

  This illustrates once again how the mind constructs its own sense of time in the future just as it does in the past and the present. Our concept of the future is tied up closely with our perception of the past. By now it should be clear that future thinking has a powerful effect on our actions. It gives us foresight and imagination, and allows us to formulate plans, but it can also warp our thinking, causing us to make decisions we might regret, from the marshmallow-like trivial to the fatally serious. But we can use future thinking to our advantage, along with the other time-frames, and it is the harnessing of all this research on time perception which I shall discuss in the final chapter.