Rich Is Far
[We hypothesized that] reminders of (a great deal of) money facilitate global, abstract mental construals … [while] reminders of expenditure or a little money should trigger more concrete mental representations. … Participants were primed with money or money-unrelated concepts. Money primes caused a preference for abstract over concrete action identifications (experiment 1), instigated the formation of broader categories (experiment 2), and facilitated the identification of global (vs. local) aspects of visual patterns (experiment 3). This effect extended to consumer judgments: money primes caused a focus on central (vs. peripheral) aspects of products (experiment 4) and increased the influence of quality of parent brands in evaluations of brand extensions. Priming with a little money (experiment 3) or expenditures (experiment 5) did not trigger abstract construals, indicating that the association between money and resources drives the effect. (more)
We’ve long known that power tends to induce far mode. So now we can say that the rich and powerful tend to think in a more far mode. That includes the entire world, since the world has been getting richer and more powerful. This plausibly explains why our “moral circles” have continued to widen over time, and helps us see why our era’s thinking is an especially deluded “dreamtime.”
I did a search on OB for Dreamtime, and it netted an interesting group of posts. But I don't see what leads Robin to conclude that our late-industrial civilization is far-mode oriented. Robin seems to base the idea that we're deluded in a distinctively far sort of way from what he takes to be our excessive optimism about the distant future. Even if this is due to far mode (to me it seems based on near-mode extrapolation), it doesn't prove that we are generally dominated by an outsized far mode, inasmuch as nobody really much cares about the distant future. [Added.] Robin emphasizes our propensity for vicarious experience, but this is an increasingly near-mode form of experience,[reality TV is the ultimate] perhaps contrasted with more far-mode reading a century or two ago.
On the merits of the various forecasts: hypothetically granting Robin's technological projections, whether we'll be reduced to Malthusian misery seems to depend entirely on the prospects for economic centralism, i.e., world socialism.
He desires a libertarian world and considers opposition to things like slavery and efforts in favor of making the world a better place for everyone (not just the happy few) to be naive, because truly an advanced civilization with all the wonders of nanotech and genetic enhancements at its fingertips should choose to make 95% of its population live lives far more miserable than that of the unluckiest cave man.