Future–present relationship insensitivity: A new perspective on psychological myopia and psychological hyperopia

Abstract

How much joy versus pain people choose to experience for the present often inversely affects how much joy versus pain they will experience in the future. Do people make choices that maximize their overall happiness? Prior research suggests that people are generally myopic (i.e., over-choosing joy for the present). We suggest that the prior research may have biasedly focused only on situations in which the future is more important than the present. Rather, people are generally insufficiently sensitive to the relative importance of the present versus the future. When the future is more important than the present, people over-choose joy for the present, thus appearing myopic, but when the future is less important than the present, people under-choose joy for the present, thus appearing hyperopic. Six experiments (along with a reason-exploration study) demonstrate our propositions and show that forcing or nudging people to choose less (more) joy for the present when the future is more (less) important increases their overall happiness. This research challenges the popular view that people are generally myopic, and supports emerging research showing that people are generally situation-insensitive and can exhibit seemingly opposite biases (e.g., myopia and hyperopia) in different situations.