Social cognition
Do we favour our future or past selves the way we favour 'me now'?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Shapes linked to your present self were matched faster and more accurately than shapes linked to yourself even one day in the past or future, which were treated like a stranger's.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Three repeated-measures experiments: participants linked geometric shapes to the current self, past or future selves and a stranger, then judged shape-label pairings; accuracy, RT and hierarchical drift diffusion parameters were compared.
- N
- Sixteen undergraduates took part in each of the three experiments; one Experiment 3 participant was excluded for not following instructions. No pooled N is analysed.
- Population
- Undergraduates at the University of Aberdeen, mostly female, with normal or corrected vision
- Outcome
- Matching sensitivity (d'), response times on matching and nonmatching trials, and diffusion model drift rate, starting point and nondecision time
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Key findings
In all three experiments, only shapes tied to the current self produced faster and more accurate matching; future and past selves performed like the stranger, even a single day away. In Experiment 2, the RT advantage for the present self over tomorrow's self was very large (d = 2.31). Diffusion modelling showed the present-self advantage came from a higher drift rate on matching trials, meaning faster evidence accumulation, and participants in every experiment also started with a bias towards answering 'match'.
Methodology
In each of three experiments, sixteen undergraduates imagined different versions of themselves (now, in a year or forty years; tomorrow or next month; yesterday or last month) and a stranger, and paired each with a geometric shape. They then saw brief shape-label pairs and pressed a key to say whether each pair matched the learned association. The researchers analysed accuracy with signal detection, reaction times with ANOVA, and fitted a hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion model to split performance into evidence-uptake speed, starting bias and nondecision time.
Limitations
Each experiment used only sixteen mostly female undergraduates from one university, so estimates are imprecise and generalisation to other groups is untested. The temporal selves were induced by a brief guided-imagery exercise, and the study cannot tell whether a different induction would let near-future selves gain priority. The task uses arbitrary shapes and a single lab paradigm, so the authors note it is unknown whether self-relevance works the same way in other judgments. The drift rate result shows where in decision-making the advantage arises, not that perception itself is literally changed.
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