Psychological Factors in Predicting Technological Development

  Ruthanna Gordon, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
  Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Psychology

Although nanotechnology products have become a reality, much of the NELSI - the nanotechnology-related ethical, legal, and social issues - discussion still focuses on future developments. Prediction, however, is a notoriously uncertain business. Recommendations for current action vary wildly based on different conclusions about "what's next" - from ETC's campaign for a global research moratorium to the utopian goals of the transhumanist movement.

What leads to such divergent opinions? What influences us when we speculate about the future? These are important questions, because our predictions need to be tempered with caution - not just the awareness that we may be wrong, but also with an acknowledgement of the mental tendencies that push us to reason in particular directions.

Thinking about the future is simultaneously natural and difficult. The ability to plan ahead develops in early childhood, but, beyond that, there are strong individual differences in temporal focus. Some people tend to live their lives focused on the past, while a smaller number focus on the future.¹ Within those types, focus may be either immediate or long-term. Only a few people are inclined to spend much time on very long-range planning. Much of this variation can be accounted for by the control that people perceive themselves to have over distant events. Those with the intelligence, education, and resources that promote success at long-term problem solving are the most likely to engage in it at all.

Nonetheless, people can be trained to think more carefully about the future. One important factor is that those who must wait for feedback learn to think further ahead than those whose actions get immediate results. Within corporate cultures, for example, R&D workers are more likely than production workers to consider temporally-distant consequences.² In general, people who are assigned long-term goals learn best how to think about changes in the world that will impact those goals.

Depth of temporal focus is not the only important factor in successful planning. One can think carefully about events 50 years hence - and be completely mistaken. On one hand, humans are very good at dealing with uncertainty. When necessary, we can draw conclusions in spite of missing or ambiguous information. On the other hand, we are also very bad at dealing with uncertainty. Once we come to conclusions about the future, we begin to view them as more definite than they actually are. In a process known as the "confirmation bias," we give greater weight to arguments that support our ideas and find it easy to dismiss or forget those that do not.³ This is best remedied by deliberately seeking out opinions and evidence that contradict one's own ideas. Although it sounds simple enough, it is something that most people unconsciously take pains to avoid. Nevertheless, it is vital to any enterprise that depends on thinking about the future - and this includes how we think about the evolution of nanotechnology and the associated NELSI.

Ruthanna Gordon, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Psychology and serves on the Center on Nanotechnology and Society's Advisory Panel.

¹P.G. Zimbardo, & J.N. Boyd, Putting Time in Perspective: A Valid, Reliable Individual-differences Metric, 77 JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 1271-1288 (1999).
²A.C. Bluedorne, Future Focus and Depth in Organizations, in A. STRATHMAN & J. JOIREMAN (EDS.) UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOR IN THE CONTEXT OF TIME: THEORY, RESEARCH, AND APPLICATION (2005).
³C.R.M. MCKENZIE, BLACKWELL HANDBOOK OF JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING (2004).