Future Self Simulation and Substance Abuse

Waytz, Adam

Abstract

A well-established relationship exists between impulsivity and substance abuse. People who are impatient tend to succumb to immediate temptation and choose immediate rewards instead of inhibiting temptation to reap delayed rewards of potentially greater value. This type of impulsivity well describes the process of choosing to smoke or use other drugs to reap immediate pleasure or relief from withdrawal instead of abstaining and attaining the long-term benefits of improved health and subjective well-being. Despite this well-established relationship, research on impulsivity and substance abuse is incomplete. Research on impulsivity in this domain typically focuses on failures of response inhibition whereby people (1) fail to identify a conflict between their prepotent response to use a drug and superordinate goals to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and (2) fail to inhibit this prepotent response. The proposed research attempt to expand on existing work by suggesting that impulsivity also results from failures of accurately representing one's future self through future self simulation. People do not automatically equate their present and future selves, at times considering their future selves to be different people altogether. To the extent that people represent their future selves as fundamentally distinct from their present selves, they do not recognize that behavior in the present can have consequences for their futures.
This research aims to explore the relationship in particular between failures of future self simulation and chronic smoking. Four studies will test whether future self simulation predicts ability to quit smoking, whether the capacity for future self simulation distinguishes regular smokers for non-regular smokers, whether future self simulation is a better predictor of impulsivity and substance abuse than response inhibition, and whether training people on future self simulation can reduce impulsivity and consequent smoking behavior. Establishing a link between future self simulation as a key mechanism of self-control can elucidate the relationship between impulsivity and smoking, provide a more complete account of this relationship than previous models of impulsivity, and potentially provide an intervention to reduce this impulsive behavior.

Public Health Relevance

The proposed research tests the extent to which impulsivity increases substance abuse because people do not adequately equate their present selves with their future selves, and thus do not consider consequences of present behavior (e.g. smoking) to affect their future selves'outcomes (e.g. poor health). This research attempts to provide a more complete understanding of the relationship between impulsivity and offers a potential intervention for reducing smoking and thereby improving health.