If you started watching a movie midway through without knowing its plot, you’d probably be better at inferring what happened before than predicting what would come next. Why do people perceive the past better than the future?
The findings were reported in a study led by Dartmouth (USA) and published in .
Previous research has shown that people are generally equally good at guessing both the unknown past and the future. However, these studies were based on very simple sequences of numbers, pictures or shapes, rather than more realistic scenarios.
People infer the past better than the future
“Real-life events have complex temporal associations that have not typically been captured in previous work, so we wanted to explore how people make inferences in situations that are more reminiscent of everyday life,” says Jeremy Manning, lead author of the study and associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, as well as director of the Contextual Dynamics Lab at the same university.
“Real-life experiences, unlike abstract sequences, often include other people,” he continues.
In the study, participants watched a series of scenes from two character-centric series: CBS’ “Why Women Kill” and Netflix’s “The Chair.” They were asked to either guess what happened before each scene or what would happen next.
The results showed consistently better than the future.
Why do people talk more about the past?
The researchers found that participants’ inferences were strongly influenced by references to specific past and future events made in . Just like in real life, the characters in the two series frequently discussed their past experiences and their future plans. Because the characters tended to talk more about the past, participants had more cues to make inferences about past events than about future ones.
To determine whether this pattern of talking more about the past extends to other conversations, the team analyzed millions of dialogues from novels, movies, TV shows and more. They found that both fictional characters and real people tend to talk more about the past than the future.
Although we can make plans for the future, our memories only tell us about the past. Just as people only remember past experiences, not future ones, fictional characters seem to do the same, perhaps to be perceived as more realistic, the study’s co-authors suggest.
“Our results show that, on average, people talk 150% more about the past than about the future. And this seems to be a general trend in human conversations,” says Manning.
Previous research has called the phenomenon of remembering the past but not the future the “psychological arrow of time.” “This phenomenon also reflects the fact that people know more about their past than their future,” explains Xinming Xu, study author and PhD student at Dartmouth.
“Our study shows that this asymmetric knowledge can be transmitted to others,” Xu concludes.
