In our Study of the Day feature series, we highlight a research publication related to a John Templeton Foundation-supported project, connecting the fascinating and unique research we fund to important conversations happening around the world.
The phrase “delayed gratification” entered printed English in 1803 (fittingly almost a century after “immediate gratification” first appeared), in the second edition of English economist Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Delayed gratification, Malthus said, was a discipline that most people lacked — with catastrophic consequences both for themselves and for future generations. Were it universally practiced, he believed, food would be sufficient, wages would rise, and “all squalid poverty would be removed from society.”
Since Malthus, the phrase has passed through Freud’s id and ego and the Stanford marshmallow experiment into the contemporary science of prospection, the study of people’s ability to imagine and evaluate different possible futures. Some of the most interesting findings have tried to tease apart the degree to which people identify with their future selves: if you feel more connected to a future you, you might be more willing to put off gratification now. (Indeed, studies have shown that people can be primed to make larger retirement investments by showing them digital simulations of how they’ll look when they’re older.)
Prospection is a kind of future-mindedness that can still come across as self-focused, or even selfish. So it seems worth asking whether planning for the benefit one’s future self might reduce a person’s interest in working for the benefit of others in the future.
In a series of unique experiments and analyses of existing studies, Kyle Fiore Law and Stylianos Syropoulos, both postdoctoral researchers at Boston College’s Morality Lab, set out to explore the relationship between two forms of thinking about the future: one, which they term Future Self-Continuity, focuses on the self; the other, Responsibility to Future Generations, looked at attitudes towards others. What Law and Syropoulos found was that people who reported a greater sense of connection with (and consideration of consequences for) their future selves were likely to also report greater levels of intergenerational responsibility.
This suggests that a person’s inclination to plan for their own future doesn’t seem to come at the expense of caring about what happens to future generations. It also indicates pathways for further investigation into the ways those two different ways of thinking about the future might be related — and whether interventions targeting one realm (like those digitally aged photos to promote retirement saving) might have a spillover effect in the other one.
Over the years Malthus’s critics have characterized his predictions about human inclinations and prospects as depressing, misanthropic, and (thankfully) not borne out by history. But his observation that delayed gratification, if practiced broadly, would be tied to multigenerational flourishing, remains a tantalizing possibility.
Still Curious?
Nate Barksdale writes about the intersection of science, history, philosophy, faith and popular culture. He was editor of the magazine re:generation quarterly and is a frequent contributor to History.com.
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