Like most people, I have been known to procrastinate on tasks and projects that are not at the top of my list of “interesting things to do.” It is not because I am unaware of the consequences of putting these things off. Rather, I am aware that putting the task off is a bad idea, but I do it anyway. Doing something that we know will have negative consequences is essentially an irrational choice.
Psychologists at the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University explain, however, that in the immediate present, putting off a task provides relief – a small, though temporary, reward. Our inclination to prioritize immediate needs over future ones is a great example of present bias. Behavioral decision-making expert Hal Hershfield has found that on a neural level, we think about our “future selves” in an abstract way rather than a personal way. When we put things off, our brains actually think that the consequences are somebody else’s problem – the problem of the “future self.”
Much like procrastination, our tendency to bias the present and discount the future can influence not just small tasks but larger decision-making tasks. This is one factor that influences our decisions around climate change. Yes, there are politics, science, economics, information, and misinformation involved, but there is also the basic fact that addressing issues of climate change means changing the status quo of how we live and consume. For many people, and certainly many decision-makers, this is an unpleasant task that would be better dealt with in the future. We have a neural tendency to perceive issues like climate change as the problem of our future self – a relative stranger in the scheme of things.
Like procrastination, the act of economic discounting in decision-making has an impact on the future. Economic discounting refers to the idea that future costs and benefits are worth less than current costs and benefits. This means that if we are faced with a decision that will have costs or benefits in the future, we should discount those costs or benefits to reflect the fact that they are not worth as much as the costs or benefits that we experience today.
In the context of climate-related decisions, the assumption is that the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions today are greater than the benefits that will be realized in the future. Therefore, according to the logic of economic discounting, it makes more sense to wait and deal with the problem in the future when the costs will be lower and the benefits will be higher.
One problem with this is that economic discounting assumes that future generations will be better off than the current generation. On the contrary, a recent survey by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center found that three quarters of survey respondents did not think their children were likely to be better off than they are economically. Meanwhile, analysts at Morgan Stanley found in 2021 that, the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”
How might we change our environmental decision-making in a way that considers the long-term impact of our actions? This requires a shift in thinking from the short-term to the long-term benefits of our actions. One way to address the limitations of economic discounting is to use alternative decision-making frameworks, such as intergenerational equity. Intergenerational equity is the idea that each generation has an equal right to the use and enjoyment of the environment – to the ecosystem services we enjoy. This idea has long been part of the democratic underpinnings of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee Confederacy) through their commitment to the 7th generation concept. In their decision-making, they consider the 7th generation coming after and remember the seventh generation who came before allowing them to see benefits beyond the present moment.
Perhaps this shift in thinking might serve to rewire the neural patterns that make us see our future self as a stranger and instead bring future generations into our present-day thinking.
Dr. Heather Farley is Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management, Assistant professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia, and an environmental policy researcher. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. The opinions found in this article do not represent those of the College of Coastal Georgia.
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