Publication: Psychological anticipation and representations of the future

Chistophe Demarque and Laurent Auzoult offer us an overview of different theories that have been used to understand the way in which individuals anticipate and represent the future. The question, far from being anecdotal, covers both individual and collective dimensions. On an individual level, our way of representing what we will be will influence our choices and the way we live our lives, in a more or less optimistic or anxious relationship to what could happen. The uncertainty inherent in the future is detailed here through the psychological processes that strive to resolve it, limit its effects and adapt to it.

On a collective level, utopian thinking and temporal perspective (the way we think about the years to come, in concrete or abstract terms for example, and the distance to which we are able to project ourselves) condition our way of being in the social world and of participating in it. What is the point of getting involved in societal changes when we can only imagine the year ahead?

Christophe Demarque and Johann Suchier make a final synthesis of these two elements of the continuum, showing that our way of anticipating the future is also more generally the same way we can think about the collective future and the changes that could take place or even those that we could cause. The idea of a collective, shared future, which could be a vector of change, is particularly topical in these times which constantly remind us of our oppositions.

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