Prospection

In psychology, prospection is the generation and evaluation of mental representations of possible futures. This ability fundamentally shapes human cognition, emotion, and motivation, and yet remains an understudied field of research, according to some psychologists. Instead of a person's past fully determining their actions, prospective psychology seeks to make prospection the center of research.

Martin Seligman played a leading role in starting the positive psychology movement, but noticed a deeper flaw in psychology: many psychologists seemed to portray humans as driven by the past. Thus, Seligman and others are leading an initiative on the study of prospective psychology, which is open to not only psychologists and neuroscientists, but also philosophers. Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada also lead the prospective psychology research movement. However, not all psychologists agree with Seligman and his colleagues that prospection has been neglected in the past psychological literature. Prospection, in the form of anticipation, was a central part of George Kelly's personal construct theory, first published in 1955.

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