A thousand sceptic hands won't keep us from the things we plan

June 6, 2024 1:19 AM

Eight studies document what may be a fundamental and universal bias in human imagination: people think things could be better. When we ask people how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better (Study 1). The bias doesn't depend on the wording of the question (Studies 2 and 3). It arises in people's everyday thoughts (Study 4). It is unrelated to people's anxiety, depression, and neuroticism (Study 5). A sample of Polish people responding in English show the same bias (Study 6), as do a sample of Chinese people responding in Mandarin (Study 7). People imagine how things could be better even though it's easier to come up with ways things could be worse (Study 8). Overall, it seems, human imagination has a bias: when people imagine how things could be, they imagine how things could be better. from Things could be better [PsyArXiv Preprints]
posted by chavenet (21 comments total)

People imagine how things could be better even though it's easier to come up with ways things could be worse

This is definitely not me...

I do appreciate the Howard Jones reference though.
posted by mmoncur at 4:23 AM on June 6 [3 favorites]

I use CBT techniques to neutralize this thought distortion. For instance, whenever I think about having a sandwich I also try to think about having -1 sandwich.
posted by Richard Saunders at 4:44 AM on June 6 [9 favorites]

If we did not imagine things could be better, why would we ever do anything differently?

"Well, that sucked. I guess I have no choice but to do it again."
posted by adamrice at 5:03 AM on June 6 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Coupe of opening comments removed. If you're one of the first responders in a thread, please thoughtful commentary about the link(s) instead of dismissive comments.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:14 AM on June 6 [6 favorites]

This was very enjoyable and interesting to read!!
posted by latkes at 5:36 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Yep this was like definitely top 10 psych output I've read.

Incredibly clear description of what they are testing and why, fun to read, and also speaks to what seems quite profound about the human tendency to want.

10/10 - would read again.
posted by web5.0 at 5:58 AM on June 6 [2 favorites]

This was very enjoyable and interesting to read!!

It was ok, I guess it could be worse.

Fine, to be more directly critical:

We figured that judgments must be built on comparisons: to say that something is bad is really to say that it s worse than something else. The thing you compare it to is just whatever pops into your head

...this is total bollocks and seems willfully ignorant of existing work on how people think and make decisions.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:02 AM on June 6 [4 favorites]

Notice Brandon Blatcher thinking of how things could be better.
posted by It is regrettable that at 6:51 AM on June 6 [2 favorites]

Sometimes I think of how things could be better, but usually I just think of how things could be more
posted by aubilenon at 6:59 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

i appreciated the international scope of this study! hopeful that there is such a wide sample of positive future orientation; wondering about 'measures of socioeconomic status' [National Library of Medicine]
posted by HearHere at 7:36 AM on June 6 [3 favorites]

I love the note about doing science at the end and the implication that it needs to be more accessible, in every sense of the word.

Getting study participants from Mechanical Turk seems like a significant bias, however. I'd like to see more studies done on this controlling for factors like diverse socioeconomic background, educational background, political allegiance, abledness, just for a start.
posted by tempestuoso at 7:44 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

I defer to country Scott Miller on this one: If you aren't going to make your dreams epic, why bother dreaming anything at all?

i also find it funny that the ratio is that skewed but we all (anecdotally) still have that Grumpy Smurf friend who is so vocally negative about everything. "Oh I got a new dog, but his tail is too furry". "Oh I moved into a mansion, but the water in the pool is a bit too cold".
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:50 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

This study is necessarily skewed in favor of people who are still alive. Optimism is a survival strategy.
posted by panglos at 8:32 AM on June 6 [2 favorites]

And the last gift that crept from Pandora’s jar…
posted by clew at 8:39 AM on June 6 [3 favorites]

I wish they'd had a way to measure intentionality in the study. Because I wonder if some of the outlook here could be, 'how would I change things?' How would I change my cell phone? Clearly I wouldn't make it worse. Putting yourself into the role of the agent of change, even unconsciously, seems like it would skew the answers. To mis-use one of their examples, "How would Congress change your cell phone" would probably elicit a different answer, right?
posted by mittens at 8:44 AM on June 6 [4 favorites]

It's good for self-motivation, bad for anticipating unintended consequences.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:04 AM on June 6 [2 favorites]

I think mittens hits on something here. I downloaded the study details to get a wider sense of the questions. For example, in the first study at least, most were of the form "What are some ways __ could be different." I'm not sure this evokes agency, but perhaps, instead, conversational norms.

If I ask you how Congress could be different, and you answer "It could be called 'Mongress' instead," I would consider this a non-serious answer. Conversationally, I think such questions IMPLY that 'different' means 'better." On my reading, the vast majority of the study questions have that conversational implication.

There may be many "how...different" questions that do NOT have that implicature. For example, if I show you a page from a coloring book that has been filled in, and ask you how it could be different, this gives you a license to respond about using different colors and such that do not necessarily improve the page. The famous Torrance Test also comes to mind as related. How many ways can I think of to use a paper clip? Lots. But not all of them (or perhaps even MOST) are better; they are just different.

I suspect you could make a whole new study with questions that avoid this conversational aspect and get a quite different set of results.
posted by O Blitiri at 12:03 PM on June 6 [3 favorites]

BTW, I realize they ran a second study to see whether people thought they meant better:

"We got another group of 169 people and asked them, "If we asked you how [ITEM] could be
["different"/"better or worse"/"worse or better"], would you assume that we wanted you to list ways it could be better, ways it could be worse, a mix of better/worse, would you not assume any of the above, or are you not sure?"

This seems like a slightly stilted way of asking what people thought they meant. My point is more about the underlying norms in conversations, where people don't often ask meta-questions about the meaning of questions. I suspect study one is the better gauge of what people thought they meant by the questions.
posted by O Blitiri at 12:17 PM on June 6 [4 favorites]

MetaFilter: you’re DEFINITELY not allowed to talk about Dyngus Day
posted by doctornemo at 1:45 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

This study reminds me of Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, where he tried to suss out the desire for a better world in anything he could find.

(I've only read the first book. Fred Jameson told me he thinks he's the only person who read the whole trilogy. One can hope.)
posted by doctornemo at 1:54 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Reasonably Everything Happens:
>> We figured that judgments must be built on comparisons: to say that something is bad is really to say that it s worse than something else. The thing you compare it to is just whatever pops into your head

...this [...] seems willfully ignorant of existing work on how people think and make decisions.

That sentence that you quoted seems to be more about how people evaluate things (i.e. assign them values such as "good" or "bad") than about how they make decisions. Do you have any sources to indicate:

• that there's a robust consensus among psychologists on how people make evaluations,
• what that consensus is, and
• how it differs from what Mastroianni and Ludwin-Peery assert here (that normative evaluations of a thing are based on comparison of that thing with a mental conception of what such a thing could be)?

posted by skoosh at 8:12 AM on June 12