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HANOVER, N.H. — Humans aren’t cut out to be fortune tellers, after all. A new study found people are better at guessing something unknown that happened in the past than they are at predicting the future.
A great way to think about this is when someone watches a TV drama mid-episode. Despite not knowing what happened earlier, psychology researchers discovered that people more accurately infer what occurred when they weren’t watching versus what would happen next.
Previous studies focused on predicting the past and future have found humans are good at guessing. However, this field of research relies heavily on simple sequences of numbers, images, or shapes instead of real-life situations.
“Events in real life have complex associations relating to time that haven’t typically been captured in past work, so we wanted to explore how people make inferences in situations that are more reminiscent of everyday life,” says study co-author Jeremy Manning, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College and director of the Contextual Dynamics Lab, in a media release. “Real life experiences, unlike abstract sequences, often include other people.”
A typical real-life scenario is watching television, which people do not always watch from start to finish. In the experiment published in Nature Communications, the researchers had participants watch several scenes from two shows: Why Women Kill and The Chair. Afterward, the participants were asked to guess what happened before the scene or what would happen next.
People did a better job of piecing together what happened before the scene they were watching than predicting what happened afterward. Context clues and references to past experiences and future plans in characters’ conversations helped participants reconstruct what happened earlier in the show. The researchers note that the two shows rely heavily on dialogue about the past, so the participants had more clues to work with for making educated guesses of earlier events than future events.
To see if this pattern of talking — talking more about the past than the future — happened in other situations, the team also studied communication in novels, movies, television shows, and other forms of media. The results were similar across all forms of media. Fictional and real people liked to talk more about the past than the future.
“Our results show that on average, people talk one-and-half-times more about the past than the future,” Manning says. “And this seems to be a general trend in human conversation.”
According to the authors, talking about the past is easier than making plans for the future because there are memories of past events to help build a foundation of the character and their problems. Characters in media behave similarly to appear more realistic to how people talk in real life.
Remembering the past but not the future is a phenomenon known as the psychological arrow of time. The theory suggests that people’s perception of time is continuously moving forward, allowing them to categorize the past, present, and future.
“This phenomenon also reflects that one knows more about their past than their future,” concludes Xinming Xu, a PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and member of the Contextual Dynamics Lab at Dartmouth College. “Our study shows that a person’s asymmetric knowledge of their own life can be transmitted to others.”
Paper Summary
Methodology
The study used a combination of experiments and data analysis to understand how people infer unobserved events in the past and future. Participants watched segments from TV dramas and were asked to predict what happened before or after the scenes they viewed. They had to either guess what might have occurred right before the segment (retrodiction) or predict what would happen next (prediction).
The researchers analyzed these responses using text analysis and natural language processing to understand whether participants were more accurate in their retrodictions or predictions. The study also used a large-scale analysis of conversational data from television shows, movies, and real-life conversations to observe patterns in how people talk about the past versus the future.
Key Results
The study found that people are generally better at guessing what happened in the past compared to predicting the future. Participants made more accurate retrodictions than predictions when watching TV show segments. The research suggested that this is because characters in the shows talked more about past events than future ones, and people used those conversational clues to make their guesses. This pattern was also observed in a large-scale analysis of real conversations, where people mentioned the past more often than the future.
Study Limitations
While the study provides interesting insights into how we think about the past and future, it has some limitations. First, the experiments were based on TV shows, which may not reflect real-life situations. Second, the participants’ guesses were based on fictional narratives, which might influence how they make inferences about events. Additionally, the study’s large-scale conversational analysis was based on scripted content from media, which may not fully represent everyday conversation.
Discussion & Takeaways
The study reveals a key insight: people are better at inferring what happened in the past than predicting future events. This asymmetry is likely due to the fact that conversations, whether in real life or fictional narratives, tend to focus more on the past than the future. This finding could have implications for understanding how people make decisions, recall memories, or even interact with others. In everyday life, we often rely on past experiences to make sense of what is happening, which could explain why we’re better at retrodiction than prediction. Understanding this bias might help in improving communication or storytelling strategies.
Funding & Disclosures
The study was conducted by researchers from Dartmouth College, Peking University, and Beijing Normal University. The authors did not report any conflicts of interest or specific funding sources directly influencing the research.
