Empathy for future generations

Actively imagine the lives of people who will inhabit the world your choices are building.

Why it works

Empathy for identifiable, concrete others is a much stronger motivator than abstract principles. Psychologically "meeting" a future person — imagining their name, their context, their relationship to your present choices — activates the same social-cognition networks that drive present-person empathy, pulling future welfare into emotionally salient territory.

How to do it

1. Write a short biography of a person who will live in 2100, using your best estimate of what their world will look like.
2. Describe how a specific current decision of yours affects that person’s options.
3. Read the biography aloud before making a decision with long-run consequences.
4. Revisit and update the biography as your understanding of long-run impacts grows.

Evidence

Research on "future self" identification finds that imagining a concrete future self (rather than an abstract one) increases decisions that benefit that future self. The mechanism — vivid mental simulation — is the same as that studied in perspective-taking research. (observational)

The Hershfield research concerns future-self continuity, not future-other empathy specifically; the extension to future generations is mechanistically sound but not separately trialed.

Sources

• Hershfield et al. (2011), increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings, Journal of Marketing Research

Common mistake

Keeping the future person abstract ("people in 2100") so they feel unreal, which defeats the purpose — concreteness and specificity are the active ingredient.