We have, both individually and collectively, always tried to imagine what the future may hold. From Athen’s Pythia to modern-day algorithms trying to predict our shopping behaviours, we have always sought ways to anticipate what tomorrow may be like. On the one hand, there is tremendous power associated with being able to see the future, because of what it could allow us to do: gather riches, control others by anticipating what they may do, avoid death (at least temporarily), or, in the best of cases, even change the course of time. It is quite literally called a “power” in fiction, and there are whole industries claiming to be able to show us what the future may hold—from very serious consultancy firms and data companies to the medium in the local ad section of the newspaper claiming to have “a third eye”. On the other hand, there is something both fascinating and terrifying about being able to know what will come next, in lifting the mystery and being able to go against the course of time. Even in fiction , characters who are given the power to look into the future can only see very limited parts of it—as Frodo looking down Galadriel’s mirror (Tolkien, 2009)—or it is at the price of their safety and sanity—as the “precogs” in Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (Dick, 2002).
Indeed, much energy and effort has been devoted to the question of the future. In the literature , science fiction and the anticipation genre have considered where technology may bring us, exploring what the future may look like some thousands of years down the line. Asimov, one of the most prolific and brilliant science fiction authors of our time, even imagined the emergence of a science that would use psychology and history to predict the future (Asimov, 2004). Utopias and dystopias , with their decisively more political perspective , have tried to imagine the best and the worst human societies that could await us. In science, modelizations and statistical analyses have tried to predict everything from the weather to the characteristics of the world population in a hundred years. Behavioural sciences, attempting to predict how we may conduct ourselves in different situations, have been on a constant rise, becoming once more the most prominent form of psychology. Their findings have been applied in economics , marketing, and politics , and have changed the way we understand the world. And at a more mundane level, newspaper and media outlets have tried to predict anything from the result of upcoming elections—with more and more surprises—to the new features of the latest iPhone.
This tendency is not new, and not all attempts have been equally successful. On the one hand, the sales of 1984 have rocketed in the United States since the last presidential election, and some have argued that Orwell forecasted post-truth when he wrote:
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then? (Orwell, 2003/1949, p. 162)
On the other hand, Herbert Hoover, the then president of the United States, famously said in June 1930: “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over.” If we must admit that people are not always extremely good at predicting the future, looking at how past generations have imagined how we would live is as fascinating as it can be, at times, hilarious or surprisingly accurate.
In 1900, John Elfreth Watkins Jr. collected the predictions for the next hundred years of eminent scientists of his time, and they are a wonderful example of the wide spectrum on which (informed) guesses about the future can be placed. It is a heteroclite list of forecasts, although many seem to be oriented towards science and technology and none predicted the important social changes of the twentieth century, including the fact that it would no longer be acceptable to have only men participate in the elaboration of such a list. Some predicted “peas as large as beats”, that “university education [would] be free for everyone”, or that we would all be able to “walk ten miles”, and that someone who could not do so would be “regarded as a weakling”. Others imagined that “stores purchases [would be made] by tube”, that “vegetables [would be] grown by electricity” because “winter [would be] turned into summer”, or, almost anticipating the internet, that “man [would] see around the world [because] persons and things of all kinds [would] be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span” (Elfreth Watkins, 1900, p. 8). What becomes clear, when reading these predictions , is that the future tends to be imagined as the prolongation of current changes one is experiencing—hence the fact that many of the examples above would very well fall within the area of expertise of the scientists interviewed by Elfreth Watkins. In other words, how we imagine the future is frequently bound to existing social knowledge of the present, and it is either seen as a prolonging—or alternative —to the current reality.
The Question of the Future in Psychology
In 1968, Maslow argued that “no theory of psychology will ever be complete which does not centrally incorporate the concept that man has his future within him, dynamically active at this present moment.” (p. 15). Yet, despite the centrality of the future in particular, and temporality in general, to human thought and behaviour, less work has explored the explicit role of imagining the future within the field of psychology. Among those who have, concepts such as “mental time travel” (MTT; Epstude & Peetz, 2012; Storm & Jobe, 2012; Tulving, 2002), “futuring” (Sools & Mooren, 2012) or “anticipatory representations in the making” (Philogene, 1999) have been developed to help us understand the complexities of future-oriented thinking. Perhaps this lack of focus comes from a poor understanding of what imagining the future actually does for individuals and social groups. As Zittoun (2013) argues, “[a] person who imagines some future event is not doing something useless. Just the contrary – imagining potential future events makes it possible to strive towards them or – in the case of adverse imaginary events – to try to avoid them.” (p. 3). This process of imagination extends not only to how we anticipate the development of our personal lives, but also how we envision the future of our social groups, be they micro-groups such as families, or macro-groups such as nations or even the fate of humanity itself. Imagination thus plays a crucial part in human thinking and behaving. Within research on memory , for example, Storm and Jobe (2012) draw on a series of experiments to illustrate that there are important differences in the consequences that remembering the past and imagining the future have on the memory . Namely, their study illustrates that “under conditions in which remembering and experienced event does cause forgetting, imagining a non-experienced event does not.” (Storm & Jobe, 2012, p. 233). Thus, it becomes crucial to consider imagining the future as linked to representing the past, but not identical in terms of the underlying psychological processes and consequences.
However, while research such as that mentioned above is crucial and moves us in the right direction in terms of understanding “futuring” or “mental time travel”, they remain focused on the individual, disregarding the extent to which individual imagination is influenced, and shaped by, the larger social world in which he exists. For example, imagining the future becomes possible by drawing on the semiotic resources available to us from our sociocultural contexts, which vary from one place to the next. Equally, in contexts of conflict and war, the ways in which individuals imagine their personal future becomes intimately linked with the anticipations they hold for their social groups, whether these relate to changing intergroup relations, power dynamics, or political ideology.
Consequently, while it seems that literature , natural and behavioural sciences, popular culture, and the media have all attempted to imagine (and more importantly, predict) what our future may be like, less has been said about the role of the social sciences, especially in their more critical forms, as may be embodied in social, cultural, and political psychology. Have we left future predictions in the hands of data scientists and experimentalists, looking down at their attempts to model a reality that we believe eludes them? Or to the mediums and other adepts of the occult, observing ...