Are future selves treated like others? Comparing determinants and levels of intrapersonal and interpersonal allocations.

People often make tradeoffs between current and future benefits. Some research frameworks suggest that people treat the future self as if it were another person, subordinating future needs to current ones just as they might subordinate others' needs to their own. Although people make similar choices for future selves and others in some contexts, it remains unclear whether these behaviors are governed by the same decision policies. So, we identify and compare the unique influence of four relevant factors (need, deservingness, liking, and similarity) on monetary decisions in both the interpersonal and intrapersonal domains. Do people treat the future self and others similarly? Yes and no. Yes, because the influence of these factors on allocations is similar for both types of targets. No, because monetary allocations to the future self are consistently higher than allocations to others. Although the future self is treated like others in some ways, important differences remain that are not fully captured by this analogy.

The Sign Effect in Past and Future Discounting.

We compared the extent to which people discounted positive and negative events in the future and in the past. We found that the tendency to discount gains more than losses (i.e., the sign effect) emerged more strongly for future than for past outcomes. We present evidence from six studies (total N = 1,077) that the effect of tense on discounting is tied to differences in the contemplation emotion of these events, which we assessed by measuring participants' emotions while they either anticipated or remembered the event. We ruled out loss aversion, uncertainty, utility curvature, thought frequency, and connection to the future and past self as explanations for this phenomenon, and we discuss why people experience a distinct mixture of emotions when contemplating upcoming events.

Personal change and the continuity of the self.

Five studies explore how anticipating different types of personal change affects people's perceptions of their own self-continuity. The studies find that improvements are seen as less disruptive to personal continuity than worsening or unspecified change, although this difference varies in magnitude based on the type of feature being considered. Also, people's expectations and desires matter. For example, a negative change is highly disruptive to perceived continuity when people expect improvement and less disruptive when people expect to worsen. The finding that some types of change are consistent with perceptions of self-continuity suggests that the self-concept may include beliefs about personal development.

Alone in a crowd of sheep: asymmetric perceptions of conformity and their roots in an introspection illusion.

The results of 5 studies showed that people see others as more conforming than themselves. This asymmetry was found to occur in domains ranging from consumer purchases to political views. Participants claimed to be less susceptible than their average peers to broad descriptions of social influences, and they also claimed to be less susceptible than specific peers to specific instances of conformity. These studies further demonstrated that this asymmetry is not simply the result of social desirability, but it is also rooted in people's attention to introspective versus behavioral information when making conformity assessments. The participants displayed an introspection illusion, placing more weight on introspective evidence of conformity (relative to behavioral evidence) when judging their own susceptibility to social influence as opposed to someone else's. Implications for self-other asymmetries, implicit social influence, and interpersonal conflict are discussed.