Exploring Time Perspective PDF

SCIENCE ARTICLE What’s Your Time Perspective? Jane Collingwood About the Author Jane Collingwood is a therapeutic counselor and psychotherapist working in Plymouth in the United Kingdom. The issues she works with include loss, anxiety, anticipatory grief, and general mental wellbeing. Collingwood...

SCIENCE ARTICLE What’s Your Time Perspective? Jane Collingwood About the Author Jane Collingwood is a therapeutic counselor and psychotherapist working in Plymouth in the United Kingdom. The issues she works with include loss, anxiety, anticipatory grief, and general mental wellbeing. Collingwood has written extensively for popular psychology websites on a wide variety of topics for both psychology professionals and the general public. BACKGROUND NOTES 1 2 3 W e are all time travelers: We draw on past memories, experience the present, and look forward to future rewards. But how easily we travel back and forth makes a crucial difference to how well we do in life and how happy we are while we’re living it. Our time perspective—whether we tend to get stuck in the past, live only for the moment, or are enslaved by our ambitions for the future—can predict everything from educational and career success to general health and happiness. Stanford University psychology professor emeritus Philip Zimbardo coined the idea of time perspective. After more than ten years’ research, he concluded that our attitude toward time is just as defining as key personality traits such as optimism or sociability. He believes that time perspective influences many of our judgments, decisions, and actions. Zimbardo recommended IL35 UNIT 3 Independent Learning • What’s Your Time Perspective? Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. Psychologist Phillip Zimbardo, whose work forms the basis for the concept of time perspective, is a social psychologist. His research often focuses on the causes of human behavior, especially factors that can urge people to act against their own interests or desires. 4 5 6 that a more future-based time perspective could help students study and progress to higher education. Most researchers believe our time perspective is largely learned in childhood. Culture also has an influence on our time perspective. Individualistic, “me-focused” societies tend to be future-focused, while more “we-focused” societies—ones that encourage social engagement—invest more in the past. Affluence also has an effect: Poorer communities tend to live more in the present. But we can all change our time perspective, Zimbardo says. Ideally, we can learn to shift our attention easily between the past, present, and future, and consciously adapt our mindset to any given situation. Learning to switch time perspectives allows us to fully take part in everything we do, whether it’s a relaxed evening enjoying a glass of wine or reminiscing about long­-ago events with an old friend. Vital though this skill is, since time perspective is largely an unconscious and habitual way of viewing things, it takes a concerted effort to improve our use of it. NOTES What’s Your Type? 7 Zimbardo identified five key approaches to time perspective. These are: 1. The “past-negative” type. You focus on negative personal experiences that still have the power to upset you. This can lead to feelings of bitterness and regret. 2. The “past-positive” type. You take a nostalgic view of the past, and stay in very close contact with your family. You tend to have happy relationships, but the downside is a cautious, “better safe than sorry” approach which may hold you back. Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. 3. The “present-hedonistic” type. You are dominated by pleasure-seeking impulses, and are reluctant to postpone feeling good for the sake of greater gain later. You are popular but tend to have a less healthy lifestyle and take more risks. 4. The “present-fatalistic” type. You aren’t enjoying the present but feel trapped in it, unable to change the inevitability of the future. This sense of powerlessness can lead to anxiety, depression and risk-taking. 5. The “future-focused” type. You are highly ambitious, focused on goals, and big on making “to do” lists. You tend to feel a nagging sense of urgency that can create stress for yourself and those around you. Your investment in the future can come at the cost of close relationships and recreation time. 8 All five types come into play in our lives at some point, but there probably will be one or two directions in which you are more UNIT 3 Independent Learning • What’s Your Time Perspective? IL36 focused. Identify these and you can start developing a more flexible, healthier approach. NOTES Using Time Perspective Effectively 9 10 Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. 11 The aim is to find a perspective which realizes our essential psychological needs and deeply held values. Balance and positivity comes from making positive use of the past, finding healthy ways to relish the present, and routinely making plans for improvement. Take your regrets, for example, and consider how they could work for you. Perhaps you could go back to college after all? Use the painful emotions to fuel your motivation. Immerse yourself in rewarding activities that demand your full attention rather than passive activities such as watching TV. This leads to greater fulfillment and is more likely to create lasting happy memories. Believe you can improve the future through your own constructive actions and you will gain a sense of empowerment and control, as well as minimizing those nagging doubts and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. By believing we will have a positive future, we actually increase our likelihood of doing so. ❧ IL37 UNIT 3 Independent Learning • What’s Your Time Perspective? SCIENCE ARTICLE Does Time Pass? Peter Dizikes About the Author Peter Dizikes is a science journalist who, prior to working as a staff writer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) News, was published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other prestigious platforms for writing on science and society. Along with articles that explain scientific concepts to the public, Dizikes has written about the interaction of science and politics, technological advancements, and education policy. BACKGROUND Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. In 1905, Albert Einstein developed the special theory of relativity, which demonstrated that the concept of time could change depending on different factors. For example, time could appear to move more slowly for people on a spaceship moving near the speed of time. In this theory, Einstein also introduced the concept of “spacetime,” in which space and time are inherently connected as a single continuum. 1 2 3 “I f you walk into a cocktail party and say, ‘I don’t believe that time passes,’ everyone’s going to think you’re completely insane,” says Brad Skow, an associate professor of philosophy at MIT. He would know: Skow himself doesn’t believe time passes, at least not in the way we often describe it, through metaphorical descriptions in which we say, as he notes, “that time flows like a river, or we move through time the way a ship sails on the sea.” Skow doesn’t believe time is ever in motion like this. In the first place, he says, time should be regarded as a dimension of spacetime, as relativity theory holds—so it does not pass by us in some way, because spacetime doesn’t. Instead, time is part of the uniform larger fabric of the universe, not something moving around inside it. NOTES UNIT 3 Independent Learning • Does Time Pass? IL38 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Now in a new book, Objective Becoming, published by Oxford University Press, Skow details this view, which philosophers call the “block universe” theory of time. In one sense, the block universe theory seems unthreatening to our intuitions: When Skow says time does not pass, he does not believe that nothing ever happens. Events occur, people age, and so on. “Things change,” he agrees. However, Skow believes that events do not sail past us and vanish forever; they just exist in different parts of spacetime. (Some physics students who learn to draw diagrams of spacetime may find this view of time intuitive.) Still, Skow’s view of time does lead to him to offer some slightly more unusual-sounding conclusions. For instance: We exist in a “temporally scattered” condition, as he writes in the new book. “The block universe theory says you’re spread out in time, something like the way you’re spread out in space,” Skow says. “We’re not located at a single time.” In Objective Becoming, Skow aims to convince readers that things could hardly be otherwise. To do so, he spends much of the book considering competing ideas about time—the ones that assume time does pass, or move by us in some way. “I was interested in seeing what kind of view of the universe you would have if you took these metaphors about the passage of time very, very seriously,” Skow says. In the end, Skow finds these alternatives lacking, including one fairly popular view known as “presentism,” which holds that only events and objects in the present can be said to exist—and that Skow thinks defies the physics of spacetime. Skow is more impressed by an alternative idea called the “moving spotlight” theory, which may allow that the past and future exist on a par with the present. However, the theory holds, only one moment at a time is absolutely present, and that moment keeps changing, as if a spotlight were moving over it. This is also consistent with relativity, Skow thinks—but it still treats the present as being too distinct, as if the present were cut from different cloth than the rest of the universal fabric. “I think the theory is fantastic,” Skow writes of the moving spotlight idea. “That is, I think it is a fantasy. But I also have a tremendous amount of sympathy for it.” After all, the moving spotlight idea does address our sense that there must be something special about the present. “The best argument for the moving spotlight theory focuses on the seemingly incredible nature of what the block universe theory is saying about our experience in time,” Skow adds. IL39 UNIT 3 Independent Learning • Does Time Pass? Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. 4 NOTES 14 NOTES Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. 15 Still, he says, that argument ultimately “rests on a big confusion about what the block universe theory is saying. Even the block universe theory agrees that . . . the only experiences I’m having are the ones I’m having now in this room.” The experiences you had a year ago or 10 years ago are still just as real, Skow asserts; they’re just “inaccessible” because you are now in a different part of spacetime. That may take a chunk of, well, time to digest. But by treating the past, present, and future as materially identical, the theory is consistent with the laws of physics as we understand them. And at MIT, that doesn’t sound insane at all. ❧ UNIT 3 Independent Learning • Does Time Pass? IL40