When Does The Present Become The Future? It Depends Who You Ask

By Emma Young In 2017, in my first ever post for the Digest, I wrote about a paper that challenged the popular idea that “now” — also known as the “subjective present” — is three seconds long. It’s just not possible to define the present so strictly, this review concluded. Instead of trying to explore what constitutes “right now”, another way to get at our conceptions of time is to ask: when does the present end and the future begin? And precisely this question has now been explored in a series of studies by Hal Hershfield at UCLA and Sam Maglio at the University of Toronto. In their paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the pair report that these perceptions can vary substantially between people — and can affect the kinds of choices that we make, with potentially significant implications for our future lives. In the first of five studies, the pair asked 199 online participants to write down, “without giving it too much thought, off the top of your head,” when they felt the present to end. They found that the responses fell into a wide range of duration categories (ranging from “right now” to “longer than a year” and “at some future event”). One fifth thought that the present ended “right now”. Another 18% indicated a time between 1 second and 1 minute from the present moment; in total, almost half considered the present to end some time within the next hour. However, some participants had a much...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Decision making Perception Time Source Type: blogs