Future events can be mentally represented in different ways, with consequences for motivation, judgement, and evaluation. The current research used correlational and experimental approaches to test a relatively unexplored influence on how events are represented: perceived similarity—or psychological connectedness—between present and future selves. Across two pre-registered studies, participants were randomly assigned to consider either future change or stability in their psychological characteristics, based on a previously established trait stability manipulation of psychological connectedness. Participants then imagined future self-relevant events and reported characteristics of their mental representations, followed by self-report measures of psychological connectedness. Contrary to expectations, there was no correlational or experimental evidence that participants focused more on analysing the broader meaning of future events and less on imagining immediate experience when they felt dissimilar to their future self. However, confirmatory analysis showed that lower self-reported psychological connectedness correlated with increased use of third-person mental imagery, in which the self is pictured from the perspective of an outside observer. Furthermore, exploratory analyses across studies indicated an association between lower psychological connectedness and a greater tendency to consider what imagined events might express about future self-identity. While causal evidence remains to be established, these findings suggest the self may become a more prominent focus in mental representations of future events during periods of anticipated personal change, with potential consequences for how people evaluate future outcomes according to whether they convey a desirable or undesirable self-image.
Fletcher et al. (Thu,) studied this question.