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

Author's Introduction People 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: References 1. A. E. Wilson &amp; M. Ross. 2001. From chump to champ: People's appraisals of their earlier and present selves. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 80: 572–584. This empirical paper demonstrates that people may often retrospectively criticize past selves even when concurrent evaluation did not show any actual improvement over the same time period. Derogating distant former selves can contribute to a sense of improvement and flatter the current self. 2. M. Ross &amp; A. E. Wilson. 2002. It feels like yesterday: Self‐esteem, valence of personal past experiences, and judgments of subjective distance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 82: 792–803. This empirical paper examines how people may shift their subjective distance from good and bad past selves to maintain a positive present self‐view. Participants regarded negative past experiences as temporally far away and positive past experiences as temporally close – this strategy was particularly common among people high in self‐esteem. 3. A. E. Wilson &amp; M. Ross. 2003. The identity function of autobiographical memory: Time is on our side. Memory , 11: 137–149. This paper reviews evidence of bi‐directional links between memory and identity: Current identity influences autobiographical memory but past experiences likewise influence people's views of their present selves. People's constructions of themselves through time serve the function of creating a coherent – and largely favorable – identity. 4. A. E. Wilson &amp; M. Ross. 2000. The frequency of temporal‐self and social comparisons in people's personal appraisals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 78: 928–942. This empirical paper demonstrates that although temporal comparisons have been studied far less extensively than social comparisons, they are important in people's self‐appraisals. Several studies demonstrate that participants report as many or more temporal‐past comparisons than social comparisons, particularly when they are interested in enhancing themselves. 5. E. J. Strahan &amp; A. E. Wilson. 2006. Temporal comparisons, identity, and motivation: The relation between past, present, and possible future selves. In: C. Dunkel, &amp; J. Kerpelman (Eds.), Possible selves: Theory, research and applications . pp. 1–15. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers. This chapter reviews research examining temporally extended selves, with a focus on the relations between present and future self and its implications for identity, motivation, and goal‐pursuit behavior. 6. M. Ross &amp; R. Buehler. 2004. Identity through time: Constructing personal pasts and futures. In: M. B. Brewer, &amp; M. Hewstone (Eds.), Self and Social Identity. pp. 25–51. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. This theoretical review paper describes how people think about their past and future selves, and discusses why it is important to understand these processes. 7. H. Markus &amp; P. Nurius. 1986. Possible selves. American Psychologist , 41: 954–969. This theoretical paper suggested that possible selves function as incentives for behavior and provided a standard against which one can measure the current or the actual future self. This piece inspired a great deal of subsequent research exploring its contentions. 8. G. Oettingen &amp; D. Mayer. 2002. The motivating function of thinking about the future: Expectations versus fantasies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 83: 1198–1212. This empirical paper illustrates the importance of how people think about the future. Oettingen and Mayer study how people's thoughts about their future selves can have very different effects depending on whether people fantasize or expect future successes. 9. N. Liberman, Y. Trope &amp; E. Stephan. 2007. Psychological distance. In: A. W. Kruglanski &amp; E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles. New York, NY: Guilford Press. This chapter reviews groundbreaking theory and research examining temporal distance effects on cognition. Liberman et al. discuss how psychological distance in general (with a focus on temporal distance) can affect people's cognitions about and construals of close or distant events. 10. L. K. Libby &amp; R. P. Eibach. 2007. How the self affects and reflects the content and subjective experience of autobiographical memory. In: C. Sedikides &amp; S. Spencer (Eds.), <jats:itali

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