Future Shock

Studies of the reactions of astronauts, displaced families, and industrial workers almost uniformly point to this conclusion. "Anticipatory information," writes psychologist Hugh Bowen, "allows ... a dramatic change in performance." Whether the problem is that of driving a car down a crowded street, piloting a plane, solving intellectual puzzles, playing a cello or dealing with interpersonal difficulties, performance improves when the individual knows what to expect next.

The mental processing of advance data about any subject presumably cuts down on the amount of processing and the reaction time during the actual period of adaptation. It was Freud, I believe, who said: "Thought is action in rehearsal."

Even more important than any specific bits of advance information, however, is the habit of anticipation. This conditioned ability to look ahead plays a key role in adaptation. Indeed, one of the hidden clues to successful coping may well lie in the individual's sense of the future. The people among us who keep up with change, who manage to adapt well, seem to have a richer, better developed sense of what lies ahead than those who cope poorly. Anticipating the future has become a habit with them. The chess player who anticipates the moves of his opponent, the executive who thinks in long range terms, the student who takes a quick glance at the table of contents before starting to read page one, all seem to fare better.

People vary widely in the amount of thought they devote to the future, as distinct from past and present. Some invest far more resources than others in projecting themselves forward – imagining, analyzing and evaluating future possibilities and probabilities. They also vary in how far they tend to project. Some habitually think in terms of the "deep future." Others penetrate only into the "shallow future."

We have, therefore, at least two dimensions of "futureness" – how much and how far. There is evidence that among normal teenagers maturation is accompanied by what sociologist Stephen L. Klineberg of Princeton describes as "an increasing concern with distant future events." This suggests that people of different ages characteristically devote different amounts of attention to the future. Their "time horizons" may also differ. But age is not the only influence on our futureness. Cultural conditioning affects it, and one of the most important cultural influences of all is the rate of change in the environment.

This is why the individual's sense of the future plays so critical a part in his ability to cope. The faster the pace of life, the more rapidly the present environment slips away from us, the more rapidly do future potentialities turn into present reality. As the environment churns faster, we are not only pressured to devote more mental resources to thinking about the future, but to extend our time horizon – to probe further and further ahead. The driver dawdling along an expressway at twenty miles per hour can successfully negotiate a turn into an exit lane, even if the sign indicating the cut-off is very close to the exit. The faster he drives, however, the further back the sign must be placed to give him the time needed to read and react. In quite the same way, the generalized acceleration of life compels us to lengthen our time horizon or risk being overtaken and overwhelmed by events. The faster the environment changes, the more the need for futureness.

Some individuals, of course, project themselves so far into the future for such long periods that their anticipations become escapist fantasies. Far more common, however, are those individuals whose anticipations are so thin and short-range that they are continually surprised and flustered by change.

The adaptive individual appears to be able to project himself forward just the "right" distance in time, to examine and evaluate alternative courses of action open to him before the need for final decision, and to make tentative decisions beforehand.

Studies by social scientists like Lloyd Warner in the United States and Elliott Jaques in Britain, for example, have shown how important this time element is in management decision-making. The man on the assembly line is given work that requires him to concern himself only with events close to him in time. The men who rise in management are expected, with each successive promotion, to concern themselves with events further in the future.

Sociologist Benjamin D. Singer of the University of Western Ontario, whose field is social psychiatry, has gone further. According to Singer, the future plays an enormous, largely unappreciated part in present behavior. He argues, for instance, that "the 'self' of the child is in part feedback from what it is toward what it is becoming." The target toward which the child is moving is his "future focused role image" – a conception of what he or she wishes to be like at various points in the future.

This "future focused role image," Singer writes, "tends ... to organize and give meaning to the pattern of life he is expected to take. Where, however, there is only a hazily defined or functionally non-existent future role, then the meaning which is attached to behavior valued by the larger society does not exist; schoolwork becomes meaningless, as do the rules of middle-class society and of parental discipline."

Put more simply, Singer asserts that each individual carries in his mind not merely a picture of himself at present, a self-image, but a set of pictures of himself as he wishes to be in the future. "This person of the future provides a focus for the child; it is a magnet toward which he is drawn; the framework for the present, one might say, is created by the future." One would think that education, concerned with the development of the individual and the enhancement of adaptability, would do all in its power to help children develop the appropriate time-bias, the suitable degree of futureness. Nothing could be more dangerously false.

Consider, for example, the contrast between the way schools today treat space and time. Every pupil, in virtually every school, is carefully helped to position himself in space. He is required to study geography. Maps, charts and globes all help pinpoint his spatial location. Not only do we locate him with respect to his city, region, or country, we even try to explain the spatial relationship of the earth to the rest of the solar system and, indeed, to the universe.

When it comes to locating the child in time, however, we play a cruel and disabling trick on him. He is steeped, to the extent possible, in his nation's past and that of the world. He studies ancient Greece and Rome, the rise of feudalism, the French Revolution, and so forth. He is introduced to Bible stories and patriotic legends. He is peppered with endless accounts of wars, revolutions and upheavals, each one dutifully tagged with its appropriate date in the past.

At some point he is even introduced to "current events." He may be asked to bring in newspaper clippings, and a really enterprising teacher may go so far as to ask him to watch the evening news on television. He is offered, in short, a thin sliver of the present.

And then time stops. The school is silent about tomorrow. "Not only do our history courses terminate with the year they are taught," wrote Professor Ossip Flechtheim a generation ago, "but the same situation exists in the study of government and economics, psychology and biology." Time comes racing to an abrupt halt. The student is focused backward instead of forward. The future, ba

This violent distortion of his time sense shows up in a revealing experiment conducted by psychologist John Condry, Professor in the Department of Human Development, Cornell University. In separate studies at Cornell and UCLA, Condry gave groups of students the opening paragraph of a story. This paragraph described a fictional "Professor Hoffman," his wife and their adopted Korean daughter. The daughter is found crying, her clothes torn, a group of other children staring at her. The students were asked to complete the story.