Leadership Talks by Hallgeir Sjåstad

Abstract

To understand how people make decisions and navigate through their lives, it is crucial to understand how they relate to the future. In this talk, I will present an overview of some central ideas and main findings from an ongoing research program on future-oriented thinking. When people think ahead, they tend to expect future improvement in happiness and meaning, perform stronger moral judgments, and perceive greater control of their own actions and outcomes. When predicting health risks and other self-relevant future events, people tend to rely on their best-case scenario and ignore their worst-case scenario, and fast predictions tend to be more optimistic than slow predictions. As possible consequences of thinking ahead, people become more willing to incur personal costs to protect their reputation, and they also become more generous in social decision-making. However, people do not always choose to focus on the future, or if they do, they might form more pessimistic expectations. A powerful obstacle to agentic future-orientation is the self-protective processes that emerge from temporary set-backs and social rejection. In the case of the sour-grape effect, initial failure makes people underestimate how good it would feel to succeed in the future. Another exception from the default of optimism, comes into play when making predictions on behalf of other people: Well-being predictions are generally optimistic for oneself and those who are deemed deserving to live a good life (friends), but not for those who are not (enemies). As a final observation, people appear to be pessimistic, rather than optimistic, when contemplating the future prospects of society as a whole. In sum, I propose that when people think ahead, they attempt to strike a balance between preparing for action (optimism) and protecting the self against threat (pessimism), in which optimism is usually the default.

What is Leadership Talks?

Leadership Talks is a series of seminars about topics related to leadership, change and sustainability, project management and organizational psychology, hosted by the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School.