Intergenerational retrospective viewpoints and individual prefe ences of policies for future: A deliberative experiment for forest management

Brain scientists establish that projecting future events can influence how human brains function and possibly current decisions (Schultz et al., 1997, Gilbert and Wilson, 2007, Gerlach et al., 2014, Szpunara et al., 2014). We design and institute a deliberative experiment to test whether acquisition and experience of intergenerational retrospective viewpoints as one way of projecting future events affect individual preferences for policies. To this end, we employ a case-method approach for forest management policies in Kochi prefecture, Japan, because the problems extend over multiple generations in nature. We prepare two treatments of non-retrospective and retrospective settings where subjects are asked to read through a case of forest management and to reveal preferences for policies at individual and group levels through deliberative discussions. Subjects in the retrospective treatment go through a series of procedures to acquire intergenerational retrospective viewpoints, while those in the non-retrospective treatment do not. The results reveal that acquisition and experience of intergenerational retrospective viewpoints affect individual preferences for forest policies in the sense that the most favorite policies chosen by subjects in the retrospective treatment are different from those in the non-retrospective treatment. Subjects in the retrospective treatment have tendencies to choose the policies as the most favorite that fundamentally change status-quo, while those in the non-retrospective treatment are opposite. Overall, this result suggests that some education or training for acquiring intergenerational retrospective viewpoints as part of projecting future could possibly affect the ways of thinking and preferences for possible betterment of the future.