A new study led by Dartmouth researchers has found that people are better at guessing what happened in the past than predicting what will happen in the future, especially in realistic situations.
The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that when we watch a story unfold, such as in a movie or TV show, we are better at figuring out what happened before a scene than predicting what will happen next.
Earlier research suggested that people are equally good at guessing both the past and the future.
However, those studies used very simple examples like sequences of numbers or shapes, which don’t reflect the complexity of real-life events.
To explore this further, researchers led by Jeremy Manning, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, wanted to test how people make inferences in situations that are more like everyday life.
In this study, participants watched scenes from two TV shows, Why Women Kill on CBS and The Chair on Netflix.
After watching each scene, they were asked to guess either what had happened earlier in the story or what would happen next.
The results showed that people were much better at guessing what had happened in the past than predicting the future.
One reason for this, the researchers found, is that characters in the shows often talked about their past experiences more than their future plans.
In real life, people do the same—our conversations often focus on things that have already happened. This gave participants more clues about the past than the future.
To see if this pattern applies more broadly, the researchers analyzed millions of conversations from books, movies, TV shows, and other sources. They found that both fictional characters and real people tend to talk about the past more than the future. On average, people talk about the past one-and-a-half times more than they talk about the future.
This pattern, known as the “psychological arrow of time,” reflects the fact that we know more about our past than our future. Lead author Xinming Xu, a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth, explains that this asymmetry in knowledge is part of human nature.
“Our memories tell us about the past, but we can only make guesses about the future,” he says. “This difference in knowledge also influences how we communicate with others.”
Overall, the study shows that people’s focus on past events, both in real life and in fiction, helps explain why we’re better at inferring the past than predicting the future.
