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Intergenerational decision making

Improving the lives of future people

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 2, page 719 (2023)Cite this article

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Pick a social issue that most people care about, such as climate change, poverty or economic inequality. Chances are the issue you selected will only grow worse for future generations of people. Yet, in the face of such overwhelming need for action, people often remain passive and fail to acknowledge that the decisions made today have a tremendous capacity to shape the future for millions of people to come. This lack of action is true regardless of the power and social status that one holds in society. Policy makers can greatly influence society through the policies they enact into laws, but ordinary citizens can also shape the lives of future generations through the values and resources they choose to pass on to them.

Whenever I think about this complex issue of intergenerational decision making (how decisions made in the present impact people in the future), the work of Kimberly Wade-Benzoni and Leigh Tost comes to mind. In their 2009 paper, Wade-Benzoni and Tost chart all the possible motivations and influences that can help people living today create a better world for future generations. Whenever I look at this masterful model of factors that influence intergenerational beneficence, I cannot help but feel optimistic that people have the capacity to take meaningful actions towards improving the lives of future people and society as a whole.

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References

Original article

  • Wade-Benzoni, K. A. & Tost, L. P. The egoism and altruism of intergenerational behavior. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 13, 165–193 (2009)

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Related articles

  • MacAskill, W. What We Owe the Future (Basic Books, 2002)

  • Wade-Benzoni, K. A. Legacy motivations and the psychology of intergenerational decisions. Curr. Opin. Psychol. 26, 19–22 (2019)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wade-Benzoni, K. A. A golden rule over time: reciprocity in intergenerational allocation decisions. Acad. Manag. J. 45, 1011–1028 (2017)

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  • Gonzalez-Ricoy, I. & Rey, F. Enfranchising the future: climate justice and the representation of future generations. WIREs Clim. Change Rev. 10, e598 (2019)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, The Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Boston College, Boston, MA, USA

    Stylianos Syropoulos

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  1. Stylianos Syropoulos
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Correspondence to Stylianos Syropoulos.

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Syropoulos, S. Improving the lives of future people. Nat Rev Psychol 2, 719 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00249-x

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