Back or to the future? Preferences of time travelers
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2012, Vol 7, Issue 4
Abstract
Popular culture reflects whatever piques our imagination. Think of the myriad movies and books that take viewers and readers on an imaginary journey to the past or the future (e.g., Gladiator, The Time Machine). Despite the ubiquity of time travel as a theme in cultural expression, the factors that underlie people’s preferences concerning the direction of time travel have gone unexplored. What determines whether a person would prefer to visit the (certain) past or explore the (uncertain) future? We identified three factors that markedly affect people’s preference for (hypothetical) travel to the past or the future, respectively. Those who think of themselves as courageous, those with a more conservative worldview, and—perhaps counterintuitively—those who are advanced in age prefer to travel into the future. We discuss implications of these initial results.
Authors and Affiliations
Florence Ettlin and Ralph Hertwig
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677897
- DOI -
- Views 104
- Downloads 0
Who says "larger" and who says "smaller"? Individual differences in the language of comparison
When comparing a pair of attribute values, English speakers can use a "larger" comparative ("A is larger/longer/higher/more than B") or a "smaller" comparative ("B is smaller/shorter/lower/less than A"). This choice matt...
“Leaving it to chance”—Passive risk taking in everyday life
While risk research focuses on actions that put people at risk, this paper introduces the concept of “passive risk”—risk brought on or magnified by inaction. We developed a scale measuring personal tendency for passive r...
Choice processes and their post-decisional consequences in morally conflicting decisions
Morally challenging decisions tend to be perceived as difficult by decision makers and often lead to post-decisional worry or regret. To test potential causes of these consequences, we employed realistic, morally challen...
Can avoidance of complications lead to biased healthcare decisions?
Imagine that you have just received a colon cancer diagnosis and need to choose between two different surgical treatments. One surgery, the "complicated surgery," has a lower mortality rate (16% vs. 20%) but compared to...
Approximating rationality under incomplete information: Adaptive inferences for missing cue values based on cue-discrimination
In a highly uncertain world, individuals often have to make decisions in situations with incomplete information. We investigated in three experiments how partial cue information is treated in complex probabilistic infere...