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Imagine you’re hiking, and on this sunny day, you see something glinting. Kneeling down, you realize it’s a piece of glass, a buried broken bottle, exposed on the trail. You’d have to dirty your hands to dig it out, and you reason that if you don’t, there’s a fair chance someone—perhaps a child—could cut themselves badly on the shard. Feeling moved to save this person from that potential future pain, you throw the bottle away.
In What We Owe the Future, the philosopher William MacAskill offers a hypothetical scenario like this one to make the simple point that future people matter. “In deciding whether to clean it up, does it matter when the child will cut herself?” he writes. “Should I care whether it’s a week, or a decade, or a century from now? No. Harm is harm, whenever it occurs.” But do people really believe that, and if they do, do they have as much empathy for pain now as for pain still to come?
“We were interested in understanding if people actually buy that,” says Matthew Coleman, a psychologist at Northeastern University. And so, with his Northeastern colleague David DeSteno, he conducted a series of four experiments probing how people relate to others’ suffering in the future. Their results were recently published in the journal Emotion, and I bet the findings would—if MacAskill were to read them—put an encouraging smile on the philosopher’s face.
People just don’t care as much about future pain as present pain.
Most of us have a present-bias. “We know that for our own well-being we systematically under-invest in our future,” says Coleman. “This is in part because we have this empathy gap between our present and future selves.” The gap could manifest in two ways: One is via future anhedonia, a forecasting bias that can lead people, for example, to predict that they wouldn’t be as happy getting, say, $1,000 in a month versus getting it now. Another is intertemporal empathy decline, a tendency to care less for future suffering because empathizing with pain that doesn’t exist yet, a form of psychological distance, is harder.
In their first two studies, Coleman and DeSteno randomly assigned more than 1,000 participants—roughly equally split between men and women who were, on average, in their late 30s—to entertain a present or future scenario: Someone breaks their ankle now or 25 years from now, and someone suffers from respiratory issues now or 25 years from now. They found the same thing: “People do buy the argument that pain is pain whenever it occurs,” says Coleman. “They just don’t care as much about future pain as present pain.”
These findings could have real-world consequences. In another experiment, involving about 2,500 participants, Coleman and DeSteno told participants they would have an opportunity to donate as much as $20 to a nonprofit and described an existing effective organization, the Clean Air Task Force, which combats pollution. The researchers then randomly assigned the participants, as with the previous experiments, to entertain a present or future scenario: that the nonprofit’s efforts would make a big impact for people living now or that it would have a big impact for people living 200 years in the future. How much of the $20 would they donate, keeping the rest for themselves? (Coleman and DeSteno told the participants that five of them would be randomly chosen to have their donation preferences honored.)
Just like before, participants’ empathy for future people diminished: Those who were told their money would help the Clean Air Task Force better the lives of others living 200 years in the future chose to donate less compared to people whose money would aid it in benefiting others now.
If we care about investing not merely in our near future—the years ahead for those of us living now—but also the deep future enjoyed by people who have yet come into being, then these findings are some cause for concern. We may recognize that their experiences—their joys and miseries—are just as valuable as our own, and yet we seem less inclined to care about them in equal measure.
Coleman doesn’t think we’re taking threats to the lives of future people seriously enough. According to a recent survey, the median risk expert predicted a 20 percent chance that a catastrophic risk to humanity (defined as 10 percent or more of everybody dying in a five-year period) would happen by 2100. “We seem to be under-investing in our collective future as a society,” he says, “with imminent problems like climate change and other technological advancements that pose risks.”
But there is hope: Coleman and DeSteno found, in another experiment with more than 1,100 participants, that vividly imagining the suffering of future people removes the intertemporal empathy decline effect. “In the real world, we want to address large global problems. Talking purely about the philosophical reasoning and the logic is important,” says Coleman, “but will fall short, because we need to address the emotional component as well.”
And that’s arguably where great art comes in. Powerful storytelling and poignant imagery, in artistic works like novels and films and video games, can transform our feelings toward issues and people we know nothing or care little about—either now or in the speculative future. “Making others’ well-being vivid and concrete and easy to imagine,” says Coleman, “is one strategy for increasing and marshaling care toward future generations.” 
Lead image: Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock
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