It was only a few hundred thousand years ago that we, Homo sapiens, began our journey as a unique species. In that time, we developed sufficient cognitive sophistication to bring about behavioral modernity, which in turn enabled nearly eight billion of us to now inhabit the Earth and transform it to our needs and wants (for better and worse).
One of the pinnacles of our accomplishments is the development of science as a method to apprehend the universe. The seeds of modern scientific thinking germinated with the ancients, but it was not until much later, some three to four hundred years ago, that the modern scientific method began to be applied widely to our understanding of the natural world.
Longer still was the wait for us to turn a scientific gaze upon ourselves.
In wasn’t until the late 1800s that the first formal psychological laboratory was formed. Much of the focus in these early days was on investigating the nature of our sensations and perception. Those early experiments helped us understand how our internal experience relates to physical reality—for instance, finding the smallest level of a stimulus we can detect. Soon, the scope of study expanded to include concepts like learning, memory, and our social worlds. Philosopher and psychologist Edna Heidbreder described psychology as “interesting, if for no other reason, because it affords a spectacle of a science still in the making.”
By envisioning what the distant future might bring, we can begin to uncover the kinds of questions the science of human behavior will be called upon to answer.
Over the next century and a half, this science-in-the-making grew quickly. The field tackled tougher and tougher problems, moving beyond probing the basic mechanisms of behavior to questioning how complex cognitive and emotional systems interact. Major discoveries came along the way, illuminating the bounded nature of our rationality, the profound impacts of social influence on our decision-making, and the connection between our brain activity and our behavior. It all coalesced to propel our knowledge of the human brain, behavior, and mind forward. In turn, this knowledge has accelerated the rate behavioral insights are being deployed in areas central to our lives, like public policy, education, and health.
But the history of our science, like our history as a species, is miniscule relative to what lies ahead. We’ve turned a scientific eye toward ourselves for only a tiny fraction of one percent of human existence. In the thousands of millennia to come, what might we expect to learn about ourselves, and how might we apply that knowledge?
Accurately predicting the future in the long run seems impossible, not least because we’re poor at predicting on shorter timescales. But that doesn’t make prospection futile. By envisioning what the distant future might bring, we can begin to uncover the kinds of questions the science of human behavior will be called upon to answer.
Deepening immersion in the digital world
An obvious place to start is how we interact with and immerse ourselves in technology. Today, we extend our minds with devices like smartphones and convene in virtual rather than physical offices. For many, entertainment and social connection comes through online, rather than in-person, activity. As our technology progresses, it seems an eventuality that a central feature of the human experience will be the metaverse, a digital, interoperable, and immersive virtual world. A virtual world where we might work, shop, socialize, and even travel.
As the lines between our physical and digital lives fade, fundamental questions about what it means to be human will arise. How might our conception of our identity change if we interact in our physical form less often than as our virtual avatars? How will our definitions of our social relationships, like that of a spouse or friend, be transformed? To what extent will individuals differ in their preference to live, work, and play in the physical or digital realms—might there be segments who reside primarily in one and not the other, leading to groups of humans occupying distinct realities, rarely interacting?
Moving beyond the mental and physical limits that have defined our species
Similar questions will arise as new technology allows us to transcend our physical and mental limits. As humans, much of our existence is governed by these boundaries. We get old. We only grow so tall or run so fast. We can only process so much information. Our ability to learn something new is constrained by our rate of learning and the time it takes to practice. We can’t do it all. Indeed, much of our early scientific study of humans involved finding and documenting these limits.
Now imagine that biomedical engineering increases our average lifespan to 200 or genetic or cybernetic interventions massively increase our intelligence; that we can reduce or eliminate the need for sleep; that adjusting our height or personality becomes as easy as selecting the attributes of a video game character. What if one day we achieve an existence entirely free from our biological constraints? Or we psychoengineer away the cognitive biases and myopic tendencies that we focus on so much today?
As humans, much of our existence is governed by physical and mental limits . . . What if one day we achieve an existence entirely free from our biological constraints?
Certainly, the idea of what it means to be human will shift. If anyone can become a polymath or a bodybuilder, how do we think of concepts like intelligence, talent, or perseverance? If elements of our minds and bodies that once were a function of genetics and life experience become more like a consumer choice, how will we come to view each other, knowing that our identities were selected rather than determined? Will such a future of choice be segregated to only a select few or made accessible to all?
And if the technologies we apply to ourselves in the future update as frequently as our phones today, what will this continual, rapid update of human ability mean for the shelf life of insights from the behavioral sciences?
Technology that outpaces its ethical application
With new possibilities come new ethical conundrums. In Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm quips that “scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” With rapid technological development opening us to so much potential change, are we already on the path to creating something we wish we hadn’t? For precedent, consider the polarizing effects of social media and the perverse incentives of the attention economy. When creating new technology, humans might do well to ask, “Should we?” more often.
Behavioral scientists of the future may similarly struggle with the question of how far behavioral science should go. The ethics of applied behavioral science is already on people’s minds, whether in the context of nudging in public policy or building machines that must make moral decisions, like autonomous vehicles. With massively increased opportunities for data collection, improved scientific methods, and more precise insights into human behavior accrued over generations, the complexity and consequence of these ethical quandaries will increase in step with, and may even outpace, our scientific development.
“If we were ever to achieve substantial progress toward our stated aim—toward the understanding, prediction, and control of mental and behavioral phenomena—the implications for every aspect of society would make brave men tremble,” George A. Miller, one of the pioneers of the cognitive revolution, wrote presciently in 1969.
A future far from guaranteed
George Miller was similarly prophetic in other ways. “The most urgent problems of our world today are the problems we have made for ourselves,” he wrote fifty years ago. “They are human problems whose solutions will require us to change our behavior and our social institutions.” The projections that the Earth will remain a suitable home for us only consider the whims of the stars—they do not consider our own influence on our destiny. In assessing the risks to our future, many experts agree that the greatest threats to our well-being and survival are anthropogenic, whether they are related to global war, destructive technology, or environmental disaster.
Behavioral science may prove to be as consequential to our future as the technology that will define it.
As we look ahead, our future is marked by both technological power and increasing uncertainty of that power. Behavioral science could serve two key roles in helping ensure that the future we build is one we want to live in. First, insights gleaned from the behavioral sciences can help us design and tune technology to human well-being and thriving—social connection, purpose, and equity. Second, experimental methods can help us evaluate whether our attempts are achieving our aims. And by empirically studying the ways that technological fusion influences our minds and behaviors, research can help us determine how far technology should go, and what boundaries we should keep between us and our creations.
If behavioral science can help us shape these new technologies and our behaviors in light of our values and psychological factors that we know lead to human flourishing, then behavioral science may prove to be as consequential to our future as the technology that will define it. And as we consider such distant horizons, many of the questions we will face tomorrow, we can begin answering today.
This essay first appeared in Behavioral Scientist’s award-winning print edition, Brain Meets World.
