An Inductive Reasoning Model of Diachronic Self-Perception

How do people perceive their selves across time? To shed light on this question, we extend the inductive reasoning model (IRM; Krueger et al., 2024-a, 2024-b) from social perception to diachronic self-perception. Based on the robust patterns that people perceive their present selves to be (a) positive and (b) more similar to their future vs past selves, the IRM predicts precisely how much the positivity of the future self will exceed the positivity of the past self (i.e. subjective growth). Illustrating the IRM’s potential to impose structure and generate conditional predictions, re-analyses of five datasets (total N = 8,544) showed subjective growth to be greater than predicted because people enhance their future self (instead of diminishing the positivity of their past self). A new empirical study (N = 135) replicated these results and indicated that attributes of the present self are more accessible than attributes of past or future selves.