Future Generations
A recent study published in the academic journal Futures provides evidence that US citizens care more about future generations than is commonly portrayed in pop culture and demonstrated through political activity.
This study used two online surveys, aggregating responses from a total of 1,000 respondents that are demographically representative of the US population in terms of age, gender, race or ethnicity, and political affiliation.
One of the surveys asked about the respondents’ personal views about future generations, and the other asked them to share their thoughts about the average American’s view on such things.
The questions were meant to assess how many generations into the future respondents thought society should consider when making decisions, today, how many generations into the future today’s politicians should consider when making legal and public policy decisions, and how far into the future human beings should still benefit from contemporary citizens’ “moral concern.”
For that last question, researchers defined a generation as people born within a 25-year period, and asked respondents how many of those periods into the future were still within their “moral circle” in terms of today’s human beings needing to worry about them (basically, thinking of them as real and human and, thus, worthy of our thought and responsibility).
What they found is that, on average, US citizens said human beings 28 generations into the future are worthy of moral concern. In contrast, these same people said they believed other US citizens would only extend their moral circle 21 generations into the future.
The same trend played out for the other questions, with individuals saying they believed society should consider 17 generations worth of humans when making decisions, and lawmakers should consider 16 generations. But when asked how they believed others would probably answer these questions, those numbers dropped to 13 generations for each question.
That means the average respondent believed at least some moral concern should be extended to human beings living 700 years in the future, but only believed other US citizens would extend their moral circle 525 years into the future. And there was a similar drop for the other two questions.
This is interesting in part because of what it shows about the dissonance between what the US public believes individually versus what US citizens believe other US citizens believe.
But it’s also interesting in that it suggests there might be a larger appetite for forward-thinking policies that take future, not-yet-born people into consideration, like those related to climate change; it’s just that many people believe their fellow citizens won’t support such measures, and thus, it may not be worth making the effort to get them passed.
Shifting the conversation away from highly politicized language and talking points and reorienting discussion toward helping future generations might then be a winning move for those hoping to promote this type of morality-centered, forward-thinking cause.