A recent study led by Dartmouth and published in Nature Communications suggests that if you were to start watching a movie from the middle without prior knowledge of its storyline, you would find it easier to deduce what happened earlier rather than foresee future events.
Previous studies indicated that people are generally adept at predicting both the past and the future. However, these studies typically involved simple sequences of numbers, images, or shapes, rather than real-life scenarios.
Jeremy Manning, the senior author and an associate professor at Dartmouth, stated, “Real-life events involve complex temporal relationships that previous studies have often overlooked. We aimed to investigate how individuals draw conclusions in situations that closely resemble daily experiences.” He added, “Unlike abstract sequences, real-life experiences often include interactions with other people.”
In the study, participants viewed scenes from two character-focused TV dramas, Why Women Kill on CBS and The Chair on Netflix. They were tasked with predicting either what had happened before the scene or what might occur next.
The findings revealed that participants were consistently more successful in inferring past events than in anticipating future occurrences.
The researchers observed that participants’ guesses were greatly shaped by the characters’ discussions about specific past and future incidents. Much like people in real life, the characters often referred to their past experiences and future intentions. Since there was a greater focus on past discussions in the two shows, participants had more information available for making inferences about past events compared to future ones.
To assess whether this tendency to discuss the past more often is common across various forms of communication, the team examined millions of dialogues in novels, films, television programs, and more. They discovered that both fictional and real individuals tend to reference their pasts more frequently than their futures. Although we can plan for what’s ahead, our memories are solely about what we have experienced. This might be a deliberate choice by writers, who aim to portray characters in a more believable manner, according to the co-authors.
“Our findings indicate that, on average, people speak about the past one-and-a-half times more than about the future,” Manning stated. “This appears to be a widespread trend in human dialogue.”
Past research has termed the tendency to remember the past while neglecting the future as the ‘psychological arrow of time.’ “This phenomenon highlights that individuals generally have more knowledge about their past than their future,” explained the lead author, Xinming Xu, a PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and a member of the Contextual Dynamics Lab. “Our study demonstrates that an individual’s unbalanced understanding of their life can be communicated to others.”
Additional contributions to the study were made by Ziyan Zhu from Peking University and Xueyao Zheng from Beijing Normal University.
