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Why we prefer to talk about the past: A new approach to time perception
A new study shows that people are better at assessing the past than the future. While they respond emotionally to complex stories, future prediction remains more difficult.
Why we prefer to talk about the past: A new approach to time perception
A new study led by researchers at Dartmouth University shows that people are better at inferring information about the past than making predictions about the future. This result was published in the journal Nature Communications and represents an interesting twist in previous research.
Traditionally, it was assumed that people were equally good at guessing both the unknown past and the future. However, this assumption was based primarily on simple sequences of numbers and shapes. The new findings come from more realistic scenarios in which people watch excerpts from television dramas such asWhy Women KillandThe Chairconsidered.
The experimental setup
In the study, participants were shown scenes from the character-driven series. Their job was to either guess the previous events or make predictions about upcoming actions. The results were clear: the subjects always performed better when it came to estimating what happened before compared to predicting future events.
A key factor in this difference was that characters' dialogue often made references to past events. The subjects thus had more clues to work with, which made inferences about the past easier. According to Jeremy Manning, one of the lead authors and a professor of psychology, this was a notable aspect of the research.
“Our results show that, on average, people talk about the past one and a half times more often than they talk about the future,” explains Manning. The researchers also analyzed conversations from a variety of genres, including literature and films, and found that both fictional and real characters exhibit this tendency.
Another fascinating aspect is the concept of the ‘psychological arrow direction of time’. This phenomenon describes the imbalance between our knowledge of the past and that of the future. Lead author Xinming Xu explains that this asymmetric knowledge becomes obvious not only to ourselves, but also to others.
In addition to Manning and Xu, Ziyan Zhu of Peking University and Xueyao Zheng of Beijing Normal University also participated in the study. Their work provides new insights into human behavior and the way we interpret and communicate memories.