I’m a big fan of TED, which puts out talks about a range of issues many of which I find inspirational.
I was watching this talk from Philip Zimbardo (of the Stanford Prison Experiment fame) late last week and I thought it might be something that readers of this blog would find interesting.
Zimbardo argues that life is temptation and how we think about time has a deep impact on how we respond to those temptations.
He says that those of us who are focused on the future are less likely to give in to temptation, but as you’ll see if you watch the film that isn’t always a positive.
In fact Zimbardo suggests the optimal person is someone who is highly focused on past positives, moderately highly focused on the future, and moderately focused on what he calls present hedonism. They have low focus on past negative experiences and what he describes as present-fatalism.
Zimbardo says that they are using these thoughts to try and tackle addiction, and on the website he’s set up to publicise his book on the subject he identifies two time perspective types that are more likely to suffer addictions; the present-hedonistic person and the present-fatalistic person. Of the latter he says:
They are likely to experience more severe psychological problems than those of other time types. Depression, eating disorders, drug addiction, suicide all ought to be more common for the fatalistic present person than others. They will perform most poorly in school because of their sell-fulfilling prophesy that nothing good happens to them, the game is fixed, they are disadvantaged, etc. These people are at great danger for engaging in all high risk, poor health activities, such as practicing unsafe sex even with a clear and present danger of AIDS or sexualiy transmitted diseases, since ‘ whatever will be, will be.”
Should you want to you can test yourself to find out how you fit in to this perspective on time.
| Published by |  |
Original source : http://www.drugeducationforum.com/blog/?ArticleID=…
Filed under: Uncategorized
