Liberman & Trope, two researchers from the Departments of Psychology of Tel Aviv and New York University respectively, recently published an article in Science magazine, entitled “The Psychology of Transcending the Here and Now” .

“People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others’ experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of information. We review research showing that there is considerable similarity in the way people mentally traverse different distances, that the process of abstraction underlies traversing different distances, and that this process guides the way people predict, evaluate, and plan near and distant situations.”

Robin Hanson over at OvercomingBias reflects upon this fascinating topic in his blog articles Abstract/Distant Future Bias and A Tale of Two Tradeoffs. Check them out!

Via TheLongNow

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 18:27 and is filed under future, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.