Summary: A new study shows that people are better at inferring past events than predicting future ones when watching scenes from TV dramas. The researchers found that participants were more accurate in guessing what had happened earlier in the story because characters tend to talk about their pasts more often than their futures.
Analyzing millions of dialogues from novels, movies, and real-life conversations, the study reveals that humans generally discuss their past 1.5 times more than their future. This suggests that both real and fictional people rely on past experiences to provide context.
Key Facts:
- People talk 1.5 times more about their past than their future.
- Participants guessed past events better than future ones in TV show scenes.
- Characters’ conversations about the past provided more clues for inferences.
Source: Dartmouth College
If you started watching a movie from the middle without knowing its plot, you’d likely be better at inferring what had happened earlier than predicting what will happen next, according to a new Dartmouth-led study published in Nature Communications.
Prior research has found that humans are usually equally good at guessing about the unknown past and future. However, those studies have relied on very simple sequences of numbers, images, or shapes, rather than on more realistic scenarios.
“Events in real life have complex associations relating to time that haven’t typically been captured in past work, so we wanted to explore how people make inferences in situations that are more reminiscent of everyday life,” says senior author Jeremy Manning, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and director of the Contextual Dynamics Lab at Dartmouth.
“Real life experiences, unlike abstract sequences, often include other people.”
For the study, participants watched a series of scenes from two character-driven television dramas, Why Women Kill on CBS and The Chair on Netflix. They were asked to either guess what had happened before each scene, or what would happen next.
Participants were consistently better at guessing what had happened before a just-watched scene than they were at guessing what would happen next.
The researchers found that participants’ inferences were heavily influenced by references to specific past and future events in characters’ conversations. Like people in real life, characters in both shows often talked about their past experiences and future plans.
Since the characters in those two shows tended to talk more about their pasts, participants had more clues to work from to make inferences about past rather than future events.
To determine if this pattern of talking more about the past extends to other conversations as well, the team analyzed millions of dialogues in novels, movies, television shows, and more. They found that fictional and real people alike tend to talk more about their pasts than their futures.
Even though we can make plans for the future, our memories only tell us about our past. Just as real people remember their prior experiences but not those in the future, so too do fictional characters, perhaps, in an effort by writers to help them appear realistic, according to the co-authors.
“Our results show that on average, people talk one-and-half-times more about the past than the future,” says Manning. “And this seems to be a general trend in human conversation.”
Prior research has referred to the phenomenon of remembering the past but not the future as the ‘psychological arrow of time.’
“This phenomenon also reflects that one knows more about their past than their future,” explains lead author Xinming Xu, Guarini, a PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and member of the Contextual Dynamics Lab.
“Our study shows that a person’s asymmetric knowledge of their own life can be transmitted to others.”
Ziyan Zhu at Peking University and Xueyao Zheng at Beijing Normal University also contributed to the study.
About this psychology research news
Author: Amy Olson
Source: Dartmouth College
Contact: Amy Olson – Dartmouth College
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Temporal asymmetries in inferring unobserved past and future events” by Jeremy Manning et al. Nature Communications
Abstract
Temporal asymmetries in inferring unobserved past and future events
Unlike temporally symmetric inferences about simple sequences, inferences about our own lives are asymmetric: we are better able to infer the past than the future, since we remember our past but not our future.
Here we explore whether there are asymmetries in inferences about the unobserved pasts and futures of other people’s lives.
In two experiments (analyses of the replication experiment were pre-registered), our participants view segments of two character-driven television dramas and write out what they think happens just before or after each just-watched segment.
Participants are better at inferring unseen past (versus future) events.
This asymmetry is driven by participants’ reliance on characters’ conversational references in the narrative, which tend to favor the past. This tendency is also replicated in a large-scale analysis of conversational references in natural conversations.
Our work reveals a temporal asymmetry in how observations of other people’s behaviors can inform inferences about the past and future.
