Think of the Children!

You start by giving children a choice: “What do you want now, pretzels or water?” Most choose pretzels, so you give them pretzels to eat. Then, ask again: pretzels or water? Unsurprisingly, many choose water. At this point, you ask them what they’ll want tomorrow.

“Presumably they're not going to be thirsty anymore, and so they should revert to their preferred option, which is the pretzels,” said Cristina Atance, a professor of psychology and Director of the Childhood Cognition and Learning Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. (She conducted the study and was kind enough to tell me about it over Zoom.)

But overwhelmingly, the kids in Atance’s study said they would want water. It was difficult for them to separate their future selves from feeling thirsty in the moment.

Fascinating. But that’s just children, and children lack patience, right?

Well, yes and no — while adults have more knowledge and experience and better behavioral control than children, all humans are notoriously lousy at setting aside current mental states and biases when thinking about the future. We are terrible at predicting our future emotions, no good at imagining our future preferences, and very bad at forecasting our future values, personalities, and trajectories.

One study by Harvard Professor of Psychology Dan Gilbert asked nearly 20,000 young, middle-aged, and older people how much they changed in the past 10 years and how much they expected to change in the following 10. The results showed that at every age, people believed that they had changed significantly in the past but would change fairly little in the future. Twenty-year-olds, for example, predicted that they would change less than 30-year-olds reported actually having changed in the same period.

In other words, we suffer from what the researchers call the “end-of-history illusion,” where at every age, people underestimate how much they will change in the future and imagine that their current selves will remain constant until the end of history. Essentially, like the children in the pretzel test, we end up mispredicting future decisions by skewing towards current states.

Surprisingly, though, research also shows that we don’t have the same biases if we think about others’ future needs and wants. That is, even if a child overwhelmingly imagines wanting water tomorrow, they often imagine that a fellow pretzel-lover will revert to baseline and prefer pretzels.

“The term we've used with children and adults is ‘other-over-self advantage,’” Atance said. “What we mean by that is that when you're reasoning about another person versus yourself, you seem to kind of show an advantage in your reasoning, or you tend to predict more accurately.”

We may not know the cause of this “other-over-self advantage” phenomenon, but it is still exciting to know that imagining the futures of others can help us better predict our own. This gives us a superpower of sorts, one that points us to a simple yet radical proposal — to think of others. Specifically, let’s think of the children: after all, we think more like they do than we might like to admit.

In July, I visited FUTURES, an eclectic-electric museum-festival in the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. There, I marveled at exhibits that juxtaposed historical artifacts, like science fiction author Octavia Butler’s typewriter, with retro visions, like Robert McCall’s 1960 Space Sail of the Future. The Bakelizer, the first machine to create completely synthetic plastic material, was featured alongside afrofuturist art, biodegradable burial pods, and a live AI light show.

Amid the inventions and reinventions, the Museum invited visitors to reflect on what they expect or hope for in the future. Last month, the FUTURES team summarized the data from their 650,000 visitors. One major conclusion was sad if unsurprising: People are much more optimistic that large-scale crises will be solved by innovation and technology — not peaceful, cooperative, human-centered solutions.

I wonder if this lack of optimism comes from a similar “end-of-history illusion,” where we can imagine the things and technologies around us changing more than we see ourselves changing. But this reasoning may be short-sighted, since technology is a product of society, and our institutions and customs are ultimately mutable. If technologies are mutable, does that not mean our ideas – which both help create and are shaped by that technology — change as well? How much would our predictions change if, instead of thinking about how we see the future, we think collectively about how our peers will? What if we think of the children?

When we think of the children, we can think for them (how we owe them a good world to grow into) and think about them (how they reveal our own failings), and we can think like them, too. According to the FUTURES data, the youngest visitors were “more likely to talk to friends and family about the future after seeing the exhibition, to see solutions for the future that were exciting to them, and to recognize similarities between themselves and the people shaping the future.”

At the FUTURES exhibit, I found myself reading through the handwritten reflections — predictions spanning generations pinned across the walls. I noticed common threads and personal goals: exploration and education, new jobs and opportunities, health, and relationships. Of all the visitor-submitted notecards that I read, I was most struck by those written by children under 10 — rumpled and compassionate hopes to work hard and “save enyrgy."

One note in particular stood out: “I will write my letters to make a future that is bright.”

Julie Heng ’24, an Editorial editor, is an Integrative Biology and Philosophy concentrator in Kirkland House. Her column “Future in Progress” typically appears on alternate Mondays.