Deadlines on calendar may appear closer than they are

In study of 'temporal Doppler effect,' researchers find that people perceive dates in future as being closer than equidistant dates in the past

 

By Katrina Menchaca

You have two exams next week, and you haven’t studied. At all.

You knew they were just around the corner, but you weren’t anticipating they’d round that corner so soon.

So what were you so busy doing last week that you didn’t crack open that textbook lying on your desk like a forgotten relic? Do you even recall what you did two Mondays ago, or is that too far away to remember?

Regardless of whether you responded to the tests by studying or dawdling, you probably perceived the looming exams as being closer in time than they actually were. Notwithstanding college-student procrastination, the perception of a future being closer than it actually is reflects other metaphors that humans employ and might help people prepare for the future.

That’s one finding of a study led by Leaf Van Boven, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Van Boven was part of a team that measured the “temporal Doppler Effect,” which occurs when a point in the future feels closer than an equidistant point in the past.

The research was led by Eugene M. Caruso at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and the team included Andrew Ward and Mark Chin at Swarthmore College’s Department of Psychology. Their results were published last year in the journal APS or the Association for Psychological Science.



Van Boven and associates recognized that given a specific time or event, people tended to say that the future felt a lot closer than the past did. Two weeks in the future might seem closer than two weeks in the past.

Why does this happen?

The researchers’ theory on our perspective of “psychological distance” reflects ways that humans make meaning of the world and stems from connecting our experiences of time to the experience of physical movement.

They call this perception of psychological distance as the “temporal Doppler effect” because it appears to mimic the Doppler effect, in which a person’s perception of sound (or other waves) changes as a noisy machine approaches and then recedes from an observer. The Doppler effect is evident as a moving car passes a pedestrian; as the car approaches, the sound perceived by the pedestrian is higher, and as the car moves away from the pedestrian, the sound drops to lower pitches.

In the temporal Doppler effect, the future is the sound coming toward us, and the past is sound receding from us. Therefore, the future “resonates louder” than the past.

Van Boven and his associates embarked on the study to try to measure the effect in an attempt to test a theory of psychological distance.

“Psychological distance is a construct of how close or far events are in space or time,” says Van Boven. “[It] is a feeling, much like people have feelings that correspond to emotional states. There is a long history of theorizing about psychological distance in psychology, but a relatively small set of studies that have measured the construct. That’s why we thought it is an important theoretical advance to do so.”

In one of their experiments, the team used a virtual-reality device that launched participants forward or backward in a virtual environment toward or away from a fountain.

Participants reported that being (virtually) propelled forward increased their perception of the psychological closeness they felt to the future. Propelling participants backwards made the past seem closer than the future.

 There is a long history of theorizing about psychological distance in psychology, but a relatively small set of studies that have measured the construct."

“The reason we used (virtual) movement was to test our theory that psychological distance is intertwined with spatial movement and metaphor,” says Van Boven. “So our question was, if our theory is correct, then spatial movement should influence temporal perspectives. Any number of other factors — emotional intensity, fluency, motivational considerations — could affect psychological distance.”

What can we gain from knowing that we are mostly future-focused individuals that lean forwards while doing so?

Van Boven and associates suggest that with this perception, we are better prepared for a big event or encroaching deadline if it seems close. It could probably be one of the reasons why a midterm or final might motivate students to study earlier and more effectively than a daily assignment.

However, their findings also allude to possible medical benefits from their research that could help health practitioners treat and diagnose certain disorders such as depression.

“People tend to be future-focused. One common indicator of depression is being ‘stuck in the past’ where people become focused on the past, which they can never move away from. In this sense, helping people to become more future-oriented might help them distance themselves from past negative emotions” says Van Boven.

Van Boven and his colleagues are continuing their research on the temporal Doppler effect. The hope is to develop larger theory in understanding our perspective of psychological distance.

“We are currently working on several follow-up experiments that examine how other experiences, such as how easily one can imagine an event, influence psychological distance” says Van Boven. “We hope to build a larger theory of how subjective experiences shape psychological distance, the sense of how close or far events, people, end objects are in space and time.”