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Navigating Into the Future or Driven by the Past.

Martin E P Seligman1, Peter Railton2, Roy F Baumeister3

  • 1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia seligman@psych.upenn.edu.

Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science
|July 15, 2015
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Human minds represent possible futures through prospection, guiding actions via present goals, not past events. This future-oriented process is fundamental to perception, cognition, and behavior.

Keywords:
consciousnessdefault circuitfree willprospectionpsychotherapytelos

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Philosophy of Mind

Background:

  • Traditional psychological models emphasize past determinants of behavior.
  • Teleology, or goal-directed action, has historically been viewed as incompatible with scientific naturalism.
  • Previous frameworks struggled to adequately explain complex human action without incorporating future-oriented processes.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To re-evaluate the role of prospection in human psychology.
  • To challenge the exclusively past-deterministic view of behavior.
  • To explore the implications of prospection for understanding consciousness and free will.

Main Methods:

  • Review of historical attempts to exclude teleology from science.
  • Synthesis of evidence from diverse research areas (perception, cognition, affect, memory, motivation, action).
  • Theoretical analysis of prospection as the generation and evaluation of "If X, then Y" conditionals.

Main Results:

  • Prospection, the representation of possible futures, is a core organizing principle across multiple psychological domains.
  • Evidence suggests that past-deterministic models are insufficient to explain human action.
  • Prospection offers a framework for understanding goal-directed behavior without invoking backward causation.

Conclusions:

  • Prospection, guided by present representations of future states, is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and behavior.
  • A shift towards a future-oriented framework is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of psychology.
  • Prospection may illuminate the nature of consciousness, free will, and mental disorders.